Throughout all this, I couldn’t help marveling at your lack of concern, your utter indifference to my feelings.

So now our albums and scrapbooks have only photos with jagged edges.  You and I and sometimes our son are smiling, but it’s always what’s not in the picture that people wonder about.  There’s the outline of a shape, for one thing, her shape.  You can see from the outline how trim she was, how slender her hips.  So this shape that I tried to make sure no one can see, is there all the same—an outline, a negative presence.

And, in all the pictures, she was standing so close that I had to cut out part of our son’s shoulder in so many of them, or part of your cheek.  It angers me to see that the evidence was all there in the pictures.  I mean, her growing closeness:  the hand on your arm, the leaning in toward our son.  But, at the time, I didn’t know how to read them correctly.  I thought only of how happy we were, how blessed our life.

After I had removed her from our albums, I looked at the pictures again.  But this time, you and even our son looked different.  There was a new expression on your face.  I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but it was there.  The jagged edges at your shoulder seemed to imply some physical hurt.  You looked querulous or unhappy.  Your fingers, with which you used to grip our son’s shoulders, looked grasping, like claws.

I saw that we were not complete, and perhaps never would be.  After that, I couldn’t look anymore; I had to close the album.  I thought of throwing everything in a dumpster.  What was left?  A part of us, a part of you, will always be missing.

Once I saw what I had done, I regretted cutting up the pictures but it was too late.  I tried filling in the edges of the places I’d cut with stenciled words:  Carmel, Summer 2004.  Or Christmas Holidays, 2005.  But each time I worked on a page, I felt I was being caught out in a lie.

Yes, your face just never looked right, even when partially covered up by words.  You looked—diminished, somehow.  Even frightened.  As if old age was coming straight at you and you were looking at it down a long dark tunnel.
*****

I only decided to file the temporary restraining order last week.  The lady who answered the phone put me through to an Officer Smart (Is that a real name?) Officer Smart told me I had to come to the station and write a formal statement, so I went.

I must admit, it was harder than I expected it to be.  Officer Smart had me sit at a table in a room by myself, and he asked me if I wanted a glass of water.  I nodded, and he came back with the glass and left without closing the door all the way.  I sat and looked at the wall.  I picked up the pencil he left for me and pulled the yellow ruled pad closer.  For a moment, I felt like forgetting the whole thing and walking out.  Because in writing about her, I’m also writing about you, and by extension our marriage, which—I hate to admit it, but this is the truth—was over perhaps 13 years ago.  If I hadn’t been so busy with the Mother’s Club, and hadn’t convinced myself that I was living a normal life, I would have known this.  Instead, we just went limping along, limping along.  I think our son knew before we did.  When he was eight – I never told you this – he looked at me and said, in that calm way of his, “Mom, Dad doesn’t love you anymore.”

After I signed the restraining order, which Officer Smart bore away with what (I thought) was a look of marked contempt on his face, I went and did the groceries and attended the last Mothers Club meeting I would ever attend.  All the women were yapping about their Botox.  Their faces were tanned and smooth, but they didn’t look healthy.  The streaks in their hair made them look hard.  And I saw for the first time the way they looked at me, the way they all avoided looking at me directly, but had to tilt their heads sideways, as if needing to see me from the side.  I kept thinking and thinking of how you left for work each day, in that glass building across the Bay.  In the early mornings, while I still had some of your attention, I’d complain about this or that parent, how enraged I was at her refusal to speak to me, even if we were seated directly across from each other at meetings.  You would nod, as if you understood.  Now I see that you weren’t listening at all, that your body was present but your mind was already looking forward, to the time when you would leave the house (with a sigh of relief?  Is this beginning to sound too much like a cliché?) and see different faces, one of them hers.

It wasn’t my fault the insemination didn’t work the second time.  I tried and tried.  You got tired, perhaps, of masturbating into a cup.  And the doctor injecting me between the legs with what felt cold and clammy.  I never told you this, but once the doctor rested his hand (without a glove yet!) on my privates.  He kept it there and continued talking to me, as if unaware where his hand was resting.  But I knew.  And I felt I couldn’t go back to him any more after that.  I just couldn’t.  And you didn’t understand.  You kept asking me, why?

Why?  I knew deep down that it wouldn’t be good.  I’d be tied down at home with the children, and you’d be off somewhere, having a good time.

It was she who gave us the name of that doctor, do you remember?  And I remember feeling so grateful, I used to tell myself, how lucky we were to have a friend like Diding.

But if I’d had my wits about me, I would have known—lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice.  What are the odds that two friends would end up pregnant after seeing the same fertility specialist?  Those are like no odds at all.  I should have changed doctors immediately after Diding had her first child.
But we held on, still tried for another two years.  Then you were laid off from your job and there was no question that we could not continue the expensive treatments.

Well, after that, we just muddled along, and after a while, without either of us saying so, we lost interest in having another child.  Anton was in the third or fourth grade, he was into Little League and soccer and I was worn out already, just driving him here and there.  And so, without either of us saying a thing to each other, we just dropped it.  One day I forgot to call the specialist to book my next appointment, and you didn’t even ask me about when we would see him again.

And anyway, that was so long ago and I’m a completely different person now.
*****

I’m still in the room, still trying to write something on the yellow ruled pad.  I never expected it to be this difficult.  To write, I mean.  I was always an A student in English class.  The teachers said I had a way with words.  And I attended Sacred Heart Prep, where such praise is never meted out indiscriminately.

I’m sorry now for cutting her out of the album pictures.  Was it that that made you realize you didn’t love me?  Or was it later, when I threw all your clothes in a heap and left them in the middle of the driveway?  You never returned from the office that day.  It was a very rainy fall and in a day or two your pants and shirts and socks were damp and sprinkled with dead brown leaves.  Finally, someone came one day, not someone I recognized, collected them and took them away to God knows where.  I watched her do it from the window.  I remember the slow and tender way with which she picked up each item of clothing, folding each one neatly before going on to the next.  Did I mention she was Filipina?  I have a kind of radar about these things.  When I saw her, I wanted to run out, do something, assault her with the frying pan, maybe.  There was a terribly hot pain in my chest that seemed to irradiate out, as from the center of a burn.  I know what a burn feels like, from the time an uncle waved his cigarette too closed to my face and the ashes landed on my cheek.  It left a mark, too, a tiny scar.  My mother was talking and laughing with my uncle and she didn’t notice.  I told myself that if she didn’t look at me, nothing had happened.  And she didn’t, you know.  She never looked once.

After the woman had left with your clothes, I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.  A flush was slowly spreading over both my cheeks.  My eyes held anger or hate or humiliation.  I looked different, and I’m not even 40.

So, I’ve been sitting here now for the better part of an hour.  The pad is still empty.  What can I say?  Out in the corridor, a young woman sits at a desk, looking over some papers.  Officer Smart, after he left me alone in this room, went out and chatted with her.  I overheard bits of their conversation:  he started telling her about a good sushi place nearby, and, next thing you know, they were talking about karaoke night.  Karaoke night?  In a police station?

It’s unfortunate that, in spite of her starched blue uniform, the woman just looks so young.  She reminds me of all the young women in the world, so many of them, whose chests jut out just like hers does, and who all feel sorry for you.

I leave the room and ask the young woman where Officer Smart is and she asks me why I’m looking for him and I tell her I have to give him a written statement.  Just then, he comes walking around the corner, really slow and casual, but I have the feeling he’s been waiting and watching all along.  He has this smirk on his face.  “Finished?” he asks.

“No,” I say.  “I need a little more time.”  I walk slowly back to the room with the table and the yellow pad.
*****

On February 26 she made a phone call to you while you were in the shower. I crouched down and reached for your cell, where you’d hidden it under the bed, and looked at the vibrating icon on the tiny screen, the number that I knew was hers.  I thought of picking up your phone, but I knew you’d be angry.  I touched it with the tip of my index finger—such an insistent ring!  As if she knew you’d want to hear from her, were in fact dying to hear from her.  Whereas when I call you at work, and you don’t pick up after the fourth ring, I immediately hang up, thinking that you’re in a meeting or something, not wanting to disturb you.

Why, why, why was she calling, when you worked in the same place and if she waited just half an hour you’d be with her?  It was 7:20 AM and if I hadn’t heard your cell phone ringing, I’d have been down in the kitchen with our son, having breakfast.

But, that day, it was Anton who had to call up to me:  “Mom, are you coming?”

I jumped up guiltily and ran down the stairs to take him to school, my face unwashed and my hair uncombed.
*****

On March 17 she called again.  This time even earlier than before.  Not even 7 AM.  And on March 19, shortly after midnight.  At that point, I picked up the phone—you were dead asleep, snoring—and screamed “Puta!!”  I lay there all night, looking at the ceiling, listening to your heavy breathing.  The next morning, you got up and got dressed to go to work. As usual, we exchanged a few pleasantries, and then, looking as staid as ever, you got into your silver Volvo and took off, giving a small wave without even turning your head.  When you got home from the office that day, you wouldn’t speak to me.
Driving home from the police station, I keep thinking of your face and wondering what you would make of the whole business.

*****

On April 18, I went shopping with Anton in Safeway.  A woman banged her cart into ours, and for whatever reason, a carton of eggs fell off hers and the eggs smashed and spilled their yellow yolks all over the floor.  She looked up at me and began yelling.  All I could do was stand there open-mouthed.  Anton dragged me away.  We were almost out the door but she was still screaming.

“Mommy, why is that lady so mad at us?” Anton kept asking.  His little face was scrunched up in anxiety.

“It doesn’t matter, Anton, it wasn’t my fault.  It was an accident,” I said.

“But why doesn’t she like us?”  Anton persisted.  “Why doesn’t anybody like us?”

“That’s not true, Anton,” I said.  “Lots of people like us.  And you have lots of friends.  But you haven’t had any over lately.  Want to give some of them a call when we get home?”

He shook his head and looked away.
*****

The day you finally sat down and told me everything, I noticed that it seemed to have made you lighter.  At least, you seemed to walk with more energy. That must be what people mean when they say, “Get a load off your chest.”  But my chest felt like it had just been hit by a ton of bricks.  I moved slowly around the garden like an old woman.  And even when I left to pick up Anton, I didn’t see people, they were moving oddly in all directions and once or twice I had to brake suddenly to avoid hitting someone.

There were times when I thought of buying a gun.  I thought I’d kill the both of you, like that headmistress who killed that diet doctor.  I watched that old movie on TV one day.  By then, I’d taken a leave from teaching.  It was too much, looking at all those bright, expectant young faces and having to tell them things I knew they wouldn’t remember in a year or so.

So, I was sitting in the living room, watching TV on the large flat-screen HDTV, the last thing you purchased before you moved out.  And there was a movie about this middle-aged headmistress, played by Annette Bening, and her diet doctor lover, played by Ben Kingsley.  And yes, yes, I could understand the satisfaction of wanting to kill someone, someone you loved very much.  I tried to imagine her at the moment she pulled the trigger.  Yes, it must have felt very good.
*****

I once went to her house, when no one was home, and snipped off all her roses.  Whack!  Whack!  She had lovely bloomers, all along her white fence.  I wondered how she’d explain that to her husband.

She must have called the police, or maybe one of the neighbors saw, because the next day a policeman came to our house.  You were in the office again, so it was just me and the officer, nice and cozy, in the kitchen.  He was big and kept his shades on, the whole time we were talking.
*****

The Officer who took my statement took her statement as well.  In fact, he had gone to see her first, which I thought was typical of the way things turn out.  This man, Officer Brown, reported that Mrs. R flew into a rage and began accusing me of “wanton cruelty” (her exact words) and of “child neglect.”
I told Officer Brown, I love my son.  You have seen him.  Remember, last week I took him to the police station and, before witnesses, had him remove his shirt?  You saw for yourself—no blemishes.  And were his ribs sticking out?  No.  What you saw was a healthy, well-fed boy.  One who has been much loved, caressed by his mother and spoiled by both parents.  Yes, you no doubt saw that.

I do not deny that I left threatening messages on her phone.   Officer Brown knew of the time, early in the morning, before first light even, when I snuck to a public phone (the one outside the Safeway) and breathed into an answering machine my fervent wish that she would die.  I did not mean it literally, of course.  But I did ask myself why it was that some people had all the luck in the world, and I had none?  Here was Diding, with a loving husband, two little boys, and a lover (my husband).  Whereas I was incapable, it seems, of generating any respect for myself or my plight.  I was requested to make no further calls to Diding or to my husband at work.

But I persist.  You see, I have no shame.  My harassing calls to her home continued, to wit: on 3/21 at 1:01 AM, on 3/22 at 3:12 AM, on 3/23 at 4:02 AM, at 3/26 at 2:14 AM.

These calls, unfortunately, did not seem to be having an adverse effect on her appearance.  I still see her, days when I am parked near her house, coming out in a beautiful leather jacket and fashionably high heels, her perfect hair smooth and shiny.  And her kids trot out obediently after her, and obediently get into the car, and I remember how sad Anton looks, and how many times I have to repeat a question now before he will answer.

In the last year, my students had begun to remark on the change in my appearance.  I have gained 17 lbs. in the last month.  When her caller ID appears, it upsets me and I am contemplating asking my doctor for a prescription for Xanax.  Her random early morning calls are clearly harassment.  One night, on 4/2, she called our home 9 times during the course of the night, only to hang up when my son or my husband answered.

My final summation is to tell you that my husband and I met with a family counselor.  This counselor is well acquainted with Diding, as we took her to the counselor when she was still living with us.  At the time, Diding was recovering from the tragic annulment of her marriage to an American man who she claimed physically abused her.  As I never saw any evidence of this abuse myself, I have only her word for it that she was repeatedly punched, kicked—once in the head, she told me—and shoved by this man who she frequently referred to as a brute.  When we took her in, she was a basket case.  She did not want to live with her parents, who were constantly telling her:  I told you so.  Having nowhere to turn, she begged us for assistance.

I am, I don’t mind telling you, a middle-aged woman of 38 years.  Diding is barely 30.  Out of the kindness of our hearts, and because she was a fellow kababayan and from the same hometown as my husband, I agreed to take her in.  I provided her with every comfort, shared my kitchen, even my clothes!  Many times, Diding asked to borrow this or that item of clothing, and because I did not like to appear selfish—or, as they say in my culture, swapang– I lent her whatever she asked for.  But one day my diamond ring disappeared, and the next month, my Gucci wallet.  Where are these items now, I ask you, Officer?  She has never returned them to me.

The counselor met with Diding during several sessions.  Her assessment was that Diding had extreme difficulty controlling her feelings.

The counselor told me a little about Diding’s family background.  Apparently, Diding’s father was a lecher who used to make passes at her girlfriends whenever they visited her house.  Moreover, Diding’s mother strongly favored her elder sister, a sister who died tragically at the age of 17, shortly after graduating valedictorian from her convent school.  Diding’s mother was inconsolable at her elder daughter’s death, and continues in a depression to this day.  As a result of what the counselor calls this “extreme family dysfunction” (though I have to say that it sounds like a normal Filipino family) Diding is apparently suffering from suppressed grief for her sister and anger at her mother and sister.  This anger is the cause of her current obsessive behavior.

For instance, this whole business with my son began with the matter of tickling.  Yes, tickling.  Diding began by playfully tickling my son’s feet and—well, things just developed from there.

With my husband, it was different.  With him, she would put on stiletto heels and a short skirt, and then, while polishing the kitchen counter, she would bend over—oh!  I can’t tell you exactly what she did, but let me say that the poor man was in quite over his head.

After the counselor had met with Diding a few times, I asked her if she thought it would be a good idea for me to obtain a restraining order.

The counselor stated firmly that she believed I must join a support group.  She gave me an 800 number for a counselor.  By this time, I had asked Diding to move out and this she had done with very bad grace.  She caused a terrible scene, shouting at me from the sidewalk so that all the neighbors heard her baselessly calling me a liar, a shameless woman.

It is not my wish to put Diding in jail, though I firmly believe she must be prevented from harming any other families with her little peccadilloes, her little games.  My husband was not the first, oh no.  She seems to make it a habit to collect Asian men.  Before my husband, there was another Filipino in the office who fell head over heels for her, and even ended up divorcing his wife, who was pregnant with their third child.

I have had to request a leave from my job.  My son’s school principal has called to inform me that my son has been “acting out”, and in the course of our twenty-minute conversation he strongly inferred that my son was perhaps suicidal.  The counselor said my son had been doodling in his notebooks and when she showed me the drawings, I did see there the many stick figures of people falling over cliffs or being ejected from airplanes.

“Yes, counselor,” I said, but these are all scenes he sees on TV every day.”

“Then I suggest you limit his TV watching to more family-oriented fare,” the counselor said, without missing a beat.  I felt this was rather indelicate of the counselor but I was really not surprised, as there are very few students in the school who actually come to see her and I really think she has no idea what we are, she so often confuses me with Mrs. Yuen, the only other Asian parent in the Mothers’ Club.

We are from the Philippines, Ma’am, I want to tell her.  Look it up.  Look it up on a map.

Respectfully Submitted,
Teresa Lorraine Concepcion (previously de Vera)

Marianne Villanueva has an MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Stanford University.  She is the author of the short story collections Mayor of the Roses:  Stories (Miami University Press) and Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (Calyx Press), which was a finalist for the Philippines’ National Book Award. In 2007, her short story, “The Hand,” won first place in the Juked Magazine Contest, judged by Frederick Barthelme.

“Why, if He’s God, can’t He just finish them in the flick of an eye?  Are they flat-crushed in their left state?”  I ask myself but never May-Belle and am off imagining them falling through the air.  “Do they float faster for being flat-crushed?”  I realize I’m not paying proper attention to May-Belle, who knows it.  May-Belle is nice (and knowledgeable), but I’ve found it doesn’t pay not to listen to her.  Carefully.  You can put on this I’m-listening self, and May-Belle will still know.  You’ll know she knows.  She’ll yank your hair and say “Oh, excuse me” all butter-wouldn’t-melty.  May-Belle has ears in every hair-root of her head and wigs.

These half-formed angels free-float, but, not being full angels as yet (as ever, actually), they start descending.  Easy-like, May-Belle says.  God wouldn’t just crash them kerplunk!  God is not mean like most humans May-Belle knows.  He wouldn’t allow even unfinished, raw angel bits to end up like smashed frogs in the road anticipating rain by the smell in the air.  Frogs have highly developed smell cells May-Belle says.

I’m careful driving now not to mash frogs.  I quit trying to get my husband Sam to avoid them because my “nagging” just made him go after them hard.  And squirrels.  I mentioned it once as I recall, and this is the reaction I’ve triggered.

I’m somewhat afraid this road-frog-hunting Sam now busies himself with gave rise to that new Country-Western song about frogs not being able to jump through the ozone layer anymore.  I’d hate to think I set off anything like that.  I could always pretend it wasn’t really my fault but May-Belle’s.  But I’m not very good at pretending about myself to myself.

May-Belle has this liberal streak a mile wide which does not fit beauticians as I know them, and I’ve been knowing beauticians a lot longer than I’ve known Sam.  But all beauticians seem to go in for the off-color.  Stories and hair.

One time when I arrived for my appointment, right on the nickel, May-Belle was finishing up her customer-before-me and holding the last-two-customers-before-the-customer-before-me spellbound with her jokes.  When I came in, not a one of them said a word to me.  May-Belle just motioned for me to sit, and the rest seemed put off by my interruption.  May-Belle was saying, “So the woman gets out of her bathtub and starts to dry herself off with this big old fluffy towel—”

“Probably one of those new sheet-towels,” I was thinking but didn’t dare say a word.  Not a word.  I knew better than to interrupt these ladies again, believe you me.

May-Belle goes right on.  “All the while she’s drying, she’s looking at herself in the mirror.  Taking little mirror-peeks by quick-pulling the towel away.  She looks at herself and looks at the mirror and decides to go whole-hog.  She says, ‘Mirror, Mirror on the wall, make my t—ies size 44.’”

Only May-Belle didn’t put in blanks.

It should of rhymed anyway.  Like in “Snow White.”  “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?”

The mirror obliged the lady.  I don’t know what she’d done for the mirror.  May-Belle never said.  But in my experience, mirrors and all don’t do such deeds without some sort of tit for tat.

When the lady’s husband came home, he takes one look at her frontage and can’t believe what his eyes are seeing.  He thinks she’s stuffed them or something.  To celebrate their good fortunes—both of them think they’ve met with good fortune—they have a good time, just the two of them.  Then the lady’s husband takes a bath, and, when he stepped out, he decides to try his luck with the mirror.  He went, “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, make my p—- reach the floor.”

May-Belle didn’t use blanks.

The lady’s husband sure-enough gets his answer.  Suddenly his legs become short and stubby.  Can you imagine!  I mean, personally, I don’t want to imagine it happening.  I try not to picture him sitting there with his wish come true only gone in the wrong direction.

May-Belle’s ladies laughed fit to kill, and I laughed a little bit with them to be polite and keep them from thinking I was thinking them nasty-minded.

I know she doesn’t mean to, but May-Belle intimidates me.  Sam says I’m just too mealy-mouthed for words, and he’d use same with reference to my relationship with May-Belle Summerlin.  But I’ve always thought there’s a difference between being nice because it’s the thing to be and saying hard-bold things because they’re hard-bold.  I think it was being brought up an only girl-child and having my daddy drip disappointment looking at me.  Mama advised keeping down-quiet as the best way to get along in this man’s world.

I admire May-Belle, though.  I’m soft-core liberal myself.  I believe all the stuff May-Belle believes but can’t come right out and say it.  I wish I could.  I’m not sure I should lay claim to soft-core liberal since I don’t preach it.

But May-Belle has this streak I don’t go along with—though it’s fascinating.  It’s what passes for “New Age” stuff in our parts.  It also has to do with May-Belle’s longings to be a “genuine entrepreneur.”  May-Belle says “wine” on the end of genuine and makes “preneur” sound like “ma—-,” but her heart’s in the right place.  She’s always coming up with a selling scheme, and “May-Belle’s Beautician’s Parlor,” which is what she calls her place of business, has every shelf crammed full of something for sale.  Mostly something with nothing to do with beauticianing.  Like children’s toys her daddy makes from old tobacco sticks—smoking pigs and such.  You have to light up the cigarette in the pig’s mouth and pump his tail, but that little rascal will smoke if you do.  That Duke lady President stated recently that North Carolina’s economy will have to produce smoking pigs to survive, but May-Belle and her daddy thought of it a long while back, and it isn’t exactly making them rich.

May-Belle believes in natural treatments.  She carries two special lines of health goods and hopes to produce her own “May-Belle Medicinals and Hair Care Products from the May-Belle Medicine and Beautician Parlor.”

May-Belle knows a lot of medicinal lore she passes along to her customers.  She says babies will be born, no matter if it requires they’re early or late, on the full moon.  They just wait around for it.  I want to ask her how they know.  Do they send out little telescopes through their mamas’ navels to check on the state of the astronomy?  May-Belle knows, though she’s divorced now.  I’ve never had any, but I’m interested, as a woman, in the baby business, so I asked if her seven came to term on the full moon.  Guess what she said?  “I don’t remember.  Besides, when the labor pains start, you don’t remember s—!”  As per usual, no blanks for May-Belle.

May-Belle has had three women customers her age all going through the change at the same time.  She was telling me about it against my time.  She says they sweat gallons.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear anymore because I was taught that women “dew.”  They don’t “s—-.”  But I didn’t tell May-Belle.  She might think I thought I was above her raising.

One of these going-through-the-change customers of May-Belle’s got so hot, she took off everything but her panties and just lay there on the bed on top of the covers “dewing.”  Then, in the middle of the night, the cat had to be taken out, and she went outside with him just like she was.  (Which I wouldn’t have the nerve to do no matter how deep I was in going through the change.  I wouldn’t sleep like that in the first place.)  The door locked behind her, and she had to stand there “buck-naked” (May-Belle is the only woman I know who uses that term.) and beat on it to wake her husband up to let her in.  I wanted to know which door she went out of and came back in and what the cat was doing while she was framming on it, but May-Belle was so into her telling I couldn’t interrupt.  She relates all this to the full moon, too.  She says that none of them are taking hormones, but she has some pills she recommended after testing them on herself.  May-Belle also claims people, especially women, are closer to having nervous breakdowns on the full moon than whenever.

All that women stuff was all right with the customers, but I couldn’t understand how they could be so accepting of her half-formed-angels-dropping-from-the-sky.  Or at least of what became of them or they became.  I liked the idea.  I think it’s downright beautiful and like God to think of it.  And I think that if everybody would just listen to May-Belle explain it before they get their feathers ruffled, they’d see how beautiful the concept is.  But people aren’t tolerant.  I’ve never found them so.  I wish I could say otherwise, but my experience doesn’t permit same.

I’ll admit, when I first tuned in May-Belle’s angels-dropping, I thought she was telling me her version of my mama’s version of Mother Goose—when it snows, Mother Goose is plucking her geese.  Which didn’t make too much sense, either, since I couldn’t figure out why Mother Goose would pluck fellow geese, a plucked goose being something on the order of a plucked chicken, which was just about as dead a duck as could be wished.  Still, I did enjoy thinking of the little snow feathers dancing their way down like down.

But since I got my childhood story of snowflakes all mixed up with May-Belle’s angels-falling, I can half-way understand the big mix-up in our town.

Suddenly there’s all this news in the local paper about the B-I-G Christmas Parade coming.  The idea, the paper said, was May-Belle Summerlin’s.  The theme was “Angel Babies,” and all local groups can enter, and there’ll be prizes for the entries best fulfilling the “Angel Babies” theme.  Sam went on and on about how stupid it was to set the whole deal square on these stupid “Angel Babies,” and I just listened and looked at him from under my eyebrows when he wasn’t looking to see if he had a clue.  He didn’t.  And I wasn’t about to set him straight.  He was already too straight in my book.  Tolerance is not high on Sam’s grace list.

I tried to feel May-Belle out on the subject, but I could never get to May-Belle’s Beautician Parlor at a time anymore when I could catch May-Belle alone.  Her customers were as excited as pie, and I didn’t want to play Doubting Thomas or Judas Iscariot.

Sam kept asking me about the plans for the BIG PARADE, but I had to hear from Essie May Sutton in May-Belle’s Beautician Parlor that Sam’s own Eastside Swamp Hunting and Fishing Club was having a float.  I didn’t say a word to Sam.  Which is one of my failings, but I thought in my heart of hearts, when the juice to stew in about this collected, Sam ought to be left to stew in it.

May-Belle’s Beautician Parlor’s float was the last one in the parade, the GRAND FINALE, because May-Belle had come up with the idea.  Sam had sneaked off on his own, not bothering to tell me he was part of the Eastside Swamp Hunting and Fishing Club float, which was called “Snow Rabbits at Bay.”  But I recognized his feet sticking out big as always from under his white rabbit costume.  Their whole float, which kicked off the parade, probably because they were all men in the Eastside Swamp Hunting and Fishing Club and May-Belle and the other ladies wanted to show how tolerant they were of members of the male persuasion, was done in white snow.  Except for the parts of the “rabbits” that showed, like Sam’s work shoes (I wouldn’t of worn my work shoes on a parade float.), it was hard to tell the rabbits from the “snow.”  The two hunters were shooting from two “blinds” at the back of the truck cab.  Most of their bodies were covered up.  I guess they were lying stretched out, but they couldn’t of been because they were close to the cab.  Their guns looked real and weren’t white, but the two rabbit hunters were dressed in white.  I made a note to ask Sam if real rabbit hunters shot from blinds and wore white, but, with what happened and all, I never asked him.  But I do know we don’t have enough snow ever to do more than kiss the ground for about ten minutes.  Which was a big thing the men folks had against May-Belle’s theme from the get-go.

There were ten floats altogether—and about ten million snow babies.  I think the Westside Swamp Ladies Craft Club must have had at least two million on their float alone.  The Garden Club had a whole garden of the little porcelain figures growing out of tulip-looking leaves.  Miss Etta’s Kindergarten Play School had nothing but snow bunnies tumbling out of giant broken-open eggs and baskets.  The Beta Club from the high school had students dressed up in different white costumes and acting out different children’s activities.  This had to be the whitest White Christmas this side of Bing Crosby.  A few floats had angels and white gauze and some other variations, but generally speaking, snow babies were the thing.

Which was just what I’d feared.  Thank goodness Senator Helms hadn’t been able to accept his invitation.

Everybody was getting pretty bored with snow babies, and my heart leaped with the thought they might go on home instead of waiting for the mayor to make his winners announcements from the reviewing stand.  But it was not to be.

This little ripple of excitement just ripped of a sudden and moved down Main Street like a cyclone.  May-Belle’s Beautician Parlor’s float had been seen by the first spectators.  She’d decorated it in her ex-husband’s barn.  May-Belle and Petrie were still on good terms, but he was married to a girl that used to waitress in Petrie’s Bar & Grill Parlor.  I don’t know whether Petrie even knew about it.  He just did the heavy stuff and left the decorating to May-Belle.

Up over everything was this waist-up Princess Di with big white angel wings.  There was this life-size cardboard Tom Hanks all eaten-away-looking from AIDS in that movie Philadelphia.  May-Belle had strung that “invisible” wire from four poles at the corners of the truck bed and had all these little waist-up figures seated on white angel wings and looking like they were flying.  Things being normal, she should of won hands down.  I couldn’t see them all as the float rolled by, but she had Jim Nabors, Rock Hudson, a British Royal Family member I still can’t name, that Ellen from TV, and the Tiptoe-Through-The-Tulips Man.  I think May-Belle had him wrong because he married a “Miss Vickie” in a TV wedding, but I was young and might not remember right.  Knowing May-Belle, I’d bet she rooted out every known one since Creation.

The clincher was the big sign on the back end of the float which said “Complete An Angel.  Help Homosexuals.  Homosexuals Are Half-Formed Sweet Angels Who Never Got To Grow Up.”

I’m sorry to report May-Belle had to move out of town.  She still has her shop, but I’m the only regular who’s regular now.  They come back only when there’s some big event and Lu Lu on the other end of town is booked solid.  May-Belle bought a little trailer which Petrie hauled over to the Wildwood Artist Colony about twenty miles out of town.  It’s been there forever, and people used to call it the “Wild Beasts” Artist Colony, but they’d pretty much forgotten about it until it took in poor May-Belle, which was a wonderful thing to do, though I don’t expect too many of the ladies from the Wildwood Artist Colony go in for beauty treatments.  Petrie won’t let May-Belle starve, and she keeps on working away but is kind of low-down in her spirits and not the bright spot in my life she used to be.  She did win this “Gays Salute Citizen Angels Award” from a national homosexual organization.  Her story made quite a splash and put our town on the map.  You may have seen May-Belle on Oprah.  But, would you believe?  Petrie and his young wife and I were the only three that went when May-Belle’s award was presented.  Not one of her seven children.  Sam forbid me to go, but I just looked at him hard and went.

Notes about this story:

It won First Prize in the Talus and Scree Contest, 1998, and was published in Talus and Scree:  An International Literary Journal.  It is also featured on the Talus and Scree Webpage.

As a play, Half-Formed Angels Fall from the Sky was a Panelist’s Choice in Playwriting, Eighth Annual Last Frontier/Edward Albee Theatre Conference, Prince William Sound Community College, Valdez, Alaska, June 9-19, 2000, and the winner of the Gilbert Theater 2001 One-Act Play Competition.  Production, April 2002, Gilbert Theater, Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler has published widely in academics and creative writing, has a story in Del Sol’s Best of 2004, won the 2006 Abroad Writers Contest/Fellowship (France), has published a novella, and has a novel and a short story collection forthcoming.  A play on Frost was a Pinter Review Prize for Drama Silver Medalist; one on Iraq won Wayne State’s 2008 Pearson Award.

DJ is the ours in our yours– mine – and– ours family. Before marrying Paul, my nuclear family was only a duo, me and my daughter, Andrea. She was born into a marriage of two young kids who hadn’t a clue about how to choose a spouse or build a life. My daughter grew up without her divorced dad and with a mother who was often at work, college, or at home, studying. We did have our intense doses of scheduled together-time, squeezed in between responsibilities while I strained to build a stable life and advance from nurse’s aide to director of nursing. Paul’s three children were more privileged than my Andrea, and they enjoyed the devotion of their stay-at-home mom who grew to be dissatisfied with her often-absent physician husband. So now here we are, Paul, with a history of giving most of his life to his job, and Amy, practiced in allocating her time to the survival needs self-evident in single parenting and career building, and DJ, born to oh-so-responsible older parents.

DJ is eleven and our other kids are all over twenty-five years old. My youngest camped and hiked with me since he was able to walk, and we grew accustomed to our outdoor time together while I served as his Cub Scout den leader. Conceived in a sleeping bag at Mauthe Lake, he’s always seemed at ease in nature. He isn’t, however, surrounded by riotous family fun. DJ’s life has been subdued by the nature and age of his family. At many of our holiday celebrations, we draw our guest list from those who live at Luther Manor Retirement Center. Many of the adults at these geriatric festivals display their wildest party nature when they accept my coffee. They generally drink decaf, but I mix caffeinated beans and decaf to make my brew. Wow, what a night we had last Thanksgiving; Grandma stayed up until nine. DJ’s always loved his older relatives, perhaps realizing that their overlapping lifespans were narrow and therefore precious in their brief commonality. He collected jokes for them, gave cello recitals, and listened to responses to his conversation, which were only phonetically related to the questions asked. And just like he has always been accommodating to the elder set, he’s generally been good about our nature outings.

Even though DJ willingly accompanies me on our walks, he usually wants to know what else is in it for him. This time he settled for a stop at a bookstore and breakfast. Over George Webb Restaurant’s pancakes, DJ kept kidding me about my literary fascination at the store. I’d leaned against a pillar and started to read Hannah Holmes, The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things. Suddenly hyper-aware of the concentration of dust between my eyes and the pages of the book, I’d read about the little particles we will all become and how many millions were floating in my morning orange juice. Realizations of the matrix in my environment, the tads of camel hair, particles of diamond dust and some creepy minuscule monsters that drank my juice as I did, entranced me. DJ’s chuckle drew me out the book.

He’d been bending in front of me, reading the title. “You’re reading about dust?”

“Yeah, it’s amazing. Some of these particles,” I pointed to a ray of low-November sun illuminating a concentration of specks in the air, “are flakes of skin supporting a village of microscopic life.”

He took the book from my hand and returned it to the shelf. “Someone needs to stop you, Mom.”

I could have held onto the book, picked it back up, or argued the point. Instead I found myself mired in DJ’s judgment of me. Reading a book about dust sounded so nerdy, I had to consider just how big of a geek I’d become.

Before we arrived at the Audubon Center, DJ joked about adding Holmes’ book about dust to my Christmas wish list. While we drove past the wooded lots and symmetrically landscaped front entrances of the immense colonial homes of Bayside, DJ fired off his list of playful ammunition.

“You’ll probably want your star calendar again so you can be sure to make us stand outside in the freezing night when the rings of Saturn and moons of Jupiter are visible in your telescope. Dad heard you telling Aunt Julie about the Walt Whitman poetry recording from the library that made you cry, so that CD might be on Dad’s list for you. You want a mushroom identification book, and now probably a book on dust.”

Would you rather I asked for a leather miniskirt and Cuban cigars?” I didn’t give him time to answer before I stepped out into the nearly miraculous warm November sun. With snow in the forecast for next week, this clear fifty-degree day felt like an unexpected last reprieve before the winter tide would cover much of our landscape in a chilling sea of white.

Most of Wisconsin’s undeveloped land teems with hunters in November, so we planned to walk in this protected sanctuary. DJ brought a camera. Oaks, birches, sumac and more had dropped their autumn cover weeks ago and now rested in the spent leaves of summer. DJ looked up the tower of a wide elm and studied the view in his camera frame. I imagined he envisioned the passage of time and recycled life that had been elevated to the open sky above the forest. When I asked him what he saw, he told me the two knots at the middle of tree looked like a lady’s chest. When I looked up, I had to agree.

Between the arbor pillars, the blues of Lake Michigan blended into sky, obscuring the horizon. Ahead of us, stood the observation tower. As we approached the structure, a family with a quintet of vociferous kids scooted around us and ascended the stairs. We followed.

Waiting one level below, while DJ climbed to the highest platform with the others, I looked out to the lake which had formed my sense of direction since I was a child. One hundred and eighteen miles across the lake to Michigan and three hundred miles from north to south, it fills the eye’s view as fully as any ocean. I always thought I was blessed with an innate internal compass, because I could access an inner awareness of my orientation to the lake. The wind on the tower carried a brisk current of lake air, fresh but with a hint of fish odor. This was a smell from my childhood. When we lived in a flat on Milwaukee’s east side, my dad would drive me to Bradford Beach with a six or twelve pack of beer in a cooler and one grape or orange soda for me cooling among his Pabst Blue Ribbon’s. And always in my memory, I see one amber bottle open and wedged between his thighs as he drove. He’d girl-watch while I played in the waves, not really swimming in the cold and strong undercurrent, but teasing the lake by running just to the white hem at the water’s edge as it came to greet me.

Dad’s slicked back black hair, side burns, and crooked sneer gave him an Elvis-type persona. Girls smiled and talked about how cute I was as they flirted with him. He might pat my blonde curls as I sat with my legs in a circle and buried my sole to sole feet with little shovelfuls of sand. A cooler full of empty bottles would clink and thud as Dad and I walked back to the car so he could get ready for his second-shift job.

He’d strut so casually, smiling and relaxed. He might break into song and hug me, or yell for me to “quit lagging behind and walk faster.” Sometimes he called me useless; sometimes he called me peanut. I didn’t know at four or five years old that he was drunk. I only knew that if I didn’t fuss, I could go to the beach. Dad always drove sporty cars, Thunderbird, Mustang convertible, and GTO. I felt cool, because he was cool. In winter or even on a sunny autumn day, like the day at Audubon, he’d sometimes take me to bars or to the local garage to “suck a few beers” with his buddies. They’d spend the early afternoon with their heads under the hood of some hot rod at Scotty’s garage. Dad let me turn the handle on the red metal vending box and crank out a handful of salty peanuts. Garage patrons would walk by me and tell me I was a good girl for sitting so still. I knew the secrets to impressing adults. Don’t ask for anything; don’t touch anything; don’t complain; don’t spill. Any violation could lead to a spanking and certainly to being yelled at. Sitting and watching became my job, but I preferred my outdoor duties, when birds, bugs and plants kept me company. My quiet creed usually worked for me. My parents exacerbated the outrages in each other and their fights could terminate in the emergency room or with dents kicked into the car or with one of them gone for a few days or weeks.

DJ appeared beside me from the upper level of the tower. “Why are you staying down here?”

“I prefer the calm. We’ll have to be quiet and wait for a while to see if any of the birds show up again.”

Is that family bugging you?”

“I know five young kids have to be noisy, but I didn’t come here to listen to people. I’ll just be patient and when they move on, we’ll watch and listen for the birds.”

A scramble of footsteps bounded behind us. DJ elbowed my arm and nodded his head toward the upper platform. He led the way up the stairs, and I remembered being about twelve and coming out of the bathroom to see my dad, pulling down the folding stairs to the attic and climbing them in his underwear and dress shirt. He’d been replacing an overhead light fixture in the front room, and I guessed he had some quick chore to finish in the attic. When the doorbell rang, I walked around the stairs to see my mom open the door to their friends, the two couples they were going out with to hear Jerry Lee Lewis, who was playing at The Annex nightclub. Mom wore high heels and a bright striped mini-dress. Her blond hair was short on her neck but ratted high and smoothed over. She served gimlets and rumacki that perfumed the house with the aroma of broiled bacon. When they asked about Dad, Mom said he was cleaning up. He’d been installing a new light. She pointed to the ceiling. From a hole in the middle of the ceiling, Dad’s head emerged clenching a light bulb in his teeth. They were all so jovial and quick to laugh. Just as they lamented that the fixture didn’t work, the light in his mouth illuminated. Dad had screwed the bulb into an electrical socket with a switched cord that ran up the left side of his face, and mom had seated everyone to the right side of his head. He held the switch in one hand and waited for his cue to electrify the little crowd. By the second round of gimlets, my dad got his pants (I never knew why he didn’t wear his pants to the attic) and quickly caught up with the cocktail count. The drinks seemed to make the story’s retelling even more fun than the actual event. The lady friend explained her shock at seeing the human light, and she reached forward and pinched the rumacki, which I was forbidden to have unless there were leftovers. She held it in front of her face and finished laughing before she delicately nibbled and crossed the ankles of her white stiletto boots.

From the hall, I imagined myself drinking highballs, wearing boots with mini-skirts, and kissing all my men-friends on the mouth like my pretty mom did. I’d grow to have beauty-parlor hair, eat rumacki, throw my head back, and laugh very loudly. I still have a square snapshot that shows Dad’s smile and clenched teeth around the lighted bulb. Most of the family pictures ended up at my home when my parents divorced. DJ has seen all the pictures of my dad as light fixture and the stack of photos of his cars. Our Saturn and minivan don’t have the same appeal as my dad’s fifty-seven T-bird with the port-hole top. He loved to take that T-bird out on sunny days without the hardtop. He said he had to “clean out the engine” and drove pedal-to-the-metal. The wind made whips of my curls, erratically beating my cheeks and eyes. My fear squelched forever in me the enjoyment of speed that others find in motorcycles and downhill skiing. But I always went for a drive with Dad when he asked. I wanted to be cool, even if it killed me. Because I loved him, and because he wanted to be with me.

On the top of the tower DJ and I faced the wind coming from the east and my hair blew straight back behind my head. From this vantage the landscape expanded and blue filled the immense dome of sky.

About a half-mile south, five children and two adults appeared to vibrate slowly, lots of movement and little forward advancement, like colorfully dressed ants on a winding trail. A pair of cardinals low in bushes attracted DJ’s attention. The coming winter had already sent most of our colorful birds adrift, the orioles, tanagers, towhees, iridescent indigo buntings, and ruby throated hummingbirds all took their exotic plumage back to the tropics. The stunning red of the cardinal offered a comforting reminder that all that is bright and beautiful had not abandoned those of us who dwell in northern winters. Wind muffled most of the bird calls, but a loud churrr call with rolling R’s turned our heads to a male red-bellied woodpecker. Over nine inches long, it’s the largest woodpecker generally seen in Milwaukee County.

Standing in the corner of the tower, DJ leaned against me so that even though we were alone on the tower, we took up very little space. He rolled around me, semi-circling from a bit behind me to a bit in front of me, all the while keeping in shoulder to shoulder contact as if we were conjoined.

Startled by a flurry of winged activity, our eyes flitted from trees to ground to bushes. At least fifty birds− what were they? I made my eyes focus on just one, and then the Wordsworth lines came with recognition, “Art thou the bird whom Man loves best, The pious bird with the scarlet breast?” They must be migrating in a flock. Our state bird, yet I’d never seen a flock this large. Busy and bossy, the robins chased each other, establishing dominance for prime resting and eating areas. Most settled in an open area behind the tower, so we turned our backs to the lake and watched them forage and compete for choice limbs on a crabapple tree. These thrushes migrate together and disperse once they reach their destination. Our last robins of the season, we didn’t expect to see more until early spring, when they return to feed on the shriveled rose hips of all the bushes that are not tended by overzealous pruners.

DJ asked, “What’s the big deal about robins? Everybody makes a fuss when they come back in spring.”

“I think it’s the songs, DJ. Robins sing our spring songs for us. Their territorial tunes are loud, recurrent and happy. They sound like spring.”

“You mean they sing for you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m truly grateful for robins, if they sing instead of you.”

We left the tower with DJ spitting over the railing at each turn of the stairs as he tested the wind. He wasn’t afraid to spit into the wind, and this time the wind didn’t return his fire.

I wanted to find the blooming witch-hazel tree and bittersweet vine which both flaunt their vivid blooms into December, so we pushed on to the woods, prairies and ponds away from the lake. DJ kept his camera out and pointed it in all directions in a combination of adolescent energy and curiosity. I tended to look where he pointed the camera.

At first glance the woods looked brown and monochromatic, but when we looked closer the colors transformed to more intense and varied shades. At the base of a dead stump, turkey tail fungus grew loud seasonal decorations. Looking close at the six-inch fans of striped color, we saw shades a kindergartener might choose to decorate his gobbler picture. Arches of tan, brown, orange and purple layered and repeated themselves in beautiful redundancy. The word fungus bears the stigma of something slimy, but these beauties felt like fine worn leather.

Tall red cedars hugged our trail and perfumed the air with a richness that fell just short of sweet. At the prairie, tall stalks of thistle dotted the grasses with deep black seed heads. Forty-foot wide stands of red dogwood posed in flashy clusters before a wide ridge of tanned and dried miscanthus grass that waved and rustled in the cooling afternoon wind. Our trail wandered near ponds of ducks and geese. They seemed to be settling in for the winter as they sauntered in the still water with an occasional push of their webbed feet toward the slowly moving shadow-line that separated day from evening and shrunk the sunshine of their afternoon.

Woodlands and prairie fields alternated dominance and after a few miles DJ put away his camera and started to play with my arm. Whacking the back of my elbow, he’d send the arm swinging forward, then bat it back and slap it forward again in a soft rhythm that didn’t really hurt. He didn’t have to say the words; I knew what he was thinking, How much further?

“It’s less than two miles back.” There was a shorter route back, but I still wanted to see the blooms of the witch hazel and bittersweet, and I felt no need to bring up the option of the quarter mile path to the parking lot.

I might have made a mistake; he seemed to have met his nature quota for the day. He kept swinging my arm and started to sing: “Lucy met the train. The train met Lucy. The tracks were juicy. The juice was Lucy.” He finished that number and went into long rendition about a pirate mutilation. “Being a pirate is all fun and games, ‘Til somebody loses an eye. It spurts and it squirts and it jolly well hurts; you can’t let your mates see you cry.…”

And before long, I sang with him. “Being a pirate is all fun and games, ‘Til somebody loses an ear. It drips down your neck, and it falls on the deck….”

We probably walked right past the witch hazel, chugging our arms and marching in rhythm. We never did find the spidery yellow blooms on a small under-story tree that I’d heard bloomed in the area. As we crossed a paved service road, I saw a couple standing still in a meadow in front of us. I grabbed DJ’s arm and pulled on his wrist like you’d pull on a light chain to turn it off, and he was quiet. I pointed ahead. “Those people are very still, they must see something.”

We walked softly into the meadow and the man, still thirty-feet ahead of us, hyper-extended his wrist and showed us his palm. We stopped. He pointed into some brush on our right. A huge doe ate, chomping and sliding her lower jaw laterally and twitching her ears. She saw us, and we stood as statues. The man pointed again to the brush. We followed his direction an immense buck turned his head to us displaying a shiny twelve-point rack. This buck had rubbed off every bit of velvet cover to polish his antlers. Autumn is the season of love for deer; they pair up and mate when the male is most impressive. His brown shiny eyes watched over his seasonal sweetheart while she continued to eat. They were only about ten feet away but stayed as if they knew this was a no-hunting area. It’s a rare treat to see a couple in love like this. After coupling, the male stays around only a few days to make sure no other male mates with his dear, then, he leaves. Either of those deer could have bounded off at thirty miles an hour, but the female just moseyed away when she’d had her fill of dogwood, and the buck followed, always watchful and never lowering his head to eat.

DJ’s words tenderly entered the quiet space. “He looked like he loved her.”

“Yes, but doesn’t it seem harsh that he leaves her so quickly?”

“Um, you want to talk harsh. What about the poor guy who’s a black widow or praying mantis.”

We both recalled a television show about the Mantis religiosa who, the narrator assured us, was the only mantis consistently cannibalistic during mating. After dancing around each other and turning their thoraxes into graceful undulating S’s the male hopped up onto her back. While he continued his dance of love in rhythmic thrusts, the larger female turned her head toward the camera as if she were an exhibitionist and wanted to be sure we were watching. The mantis is the only insect that has an elongated thorax that looks like a neck and turns its head from side to side like a human. She continued turning her face upward to meet the trancelike gaze of her mate. We knew what was coming, but couldn’t look away while she took three bites of his head. And while she chomped off his entire face and chewed, his abdomen continued to thrust. The voice-over told us, in the religiosa species, head removal is necessary for ejaculation.

We reclaimed our feelings of tenderness for the short-lived romance of the deer and continued our walk. DJ drifted ahead of me. Dried compass plants, whose leaves looked like over-cooked potato chips, bent erratically as a band of purple finches poked at the black seed heads of a plant that had once been a favorite of the buffalo. The reeds of the dry grasses played their wind music as we finished our walk, an audience to the symphony. DJ swung his arms dramatically and walked ahead of me as we each found our own thoughts.

I had learned to be taciturn in my childhood home for reasons that no longer existed. As I little girl, I waited for the time I could be noisy and wild and fun whenever I wanted, and by the time I was a young teenager I joined in at my parent’s parties. Older men noticed me, offered me drinks, and danced with me, and many of them started kissing me hello and good-bye as they did to my mother. My parents were non-reactive to these events. Dad never taught me to dance, but a friend of his did, with his tub of scotch on the rocks gripped in his hand and clinking behind my back as we turned. Once I was attractive to these men, I was included in the parties. I soon discovered I didn’t care to be around these adults as their sophistication dissolved and their vowels slurred. As a small child I did want to be part of my parent’s fun, but by my late teens I found reasons to avoid the parties that had started to feel creepy. As an adult, I realized more specifically that the danger of sexual abuse hovered around me at these parties, but at the time I don’t think I was cognizant of the danger. The drunks who didn’t get loud got boring, and trapped me in my respect-your-elders attention while offering me their incoherent and unwelcome philosophies. I took a lot of walks so as to spend as much time away from the sloshy tumult in our home as possible. My adult interests in astronomy, gardening, reading, birding, and nature were enhanced by the gift my parents gave me as a small child. They taught me to sit upon my throne of silence and learn the comfort and wonders found in stillness.

The cooling air inched winter closer with every step in our walk. Perhaps we would return in the season of snow, when the witch-hazel seed-pods burst and crack like a gun, a trait that changes the name of this tree in winter to snapping-hazel. I tried not to lament the passing season and the expected bitterness of winter weather. Robert Frost loved his Vermont winters, yet he understood the melancholy I felt, as he expressed in the last lines of “Reluctance”:

Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

I will probably spend some winter evenings reading about dust, history, nature, and fictional lives, but I won’t wear a miniskirt or white stiletto boots. Rather than watch me from the hall, DJ will lie on the sofa near my chair and read his new favorite author, Kristin Frankline. Occasionally, we’ll interrupt each other to share a well-crafted line, fascinating fact, or a joke. I could make rumacki. Paul and I can share the moniker of geek, if that means we are quiet more than riotous. DJ can be the cool one in our home and keep us somewhat current on the new song releases from Black-eyed Peas and Outcast. We will host or attend a few parties, and we will laugh and be silly and occasionally a bit loud, but we won’t live the drama that I experienced as a child. I’d forgotten that I’d made that choice decades ago and again sixteen years ago, when I chose to be with my contemplative Paul. This life was the only one I could share with my son.

DJ, still twenty yards in front of me, turned around to face me. “Parking lot’s just ahead.” I nodded and watched his lanky limbs and broad strides carry him away. Only this spring, he’d been in grade school when his voice sounded more like mine than his father’s. His shoulders have grown broader than his hips, and his little love handles just above his belt melted away during his first football season. His growth during the year has been relentless in its message: There is so little of his childhood left.

The grassy path smoothed and widened just before the parking lot and DJ performed a sloppy cartwheel ending with a distinctive thud on the blacktop. He never turned around to see if I was watching; he knew.

DJ and I stood at each side of the car, the doors open, drinking water and lingering in the day’s final rays of sunshine. We’d walked quickly that last mile and our bodies were warmed from the inside. We threw our sweatshirts in the backseat of the car to enjoy the brisk air. A pick-up truck pulled in next to us, and DJ turned to close his car door to make more room in the adjacent parking spot. When he faced the woman in the truck, she smiled and gave him the OK sign. DJ pointed to his shirt that said, “Stop Reading My T-shirt” and nodded back to the good-natured driver who was quickly off for her walk before the sanctuary closed.

Just before I lifted a foot to enter the car and end our autumn, I saw a burst of color ahead. Right in front of our parking space a bittersweet vine glowed in colors of fuchsia and orange. Tiny beacons of seed pods, hundreds of them, blazed bright in front of us. DJ followed me to the vine, and we studied the red arils, little fleshy fruits, and the orange capsules that fold back like petals, so bright they’re almost garish in their celebration of themselves.

We stood silently, each inspecting the beautiful intricacy of the pods– smaller than a pea, but so sumptuous in their beauty it took us several minutes to ingest the diminutive wonders. They seemed almost too fancy for bird food, but then they were also the ripe fruit of sexual reproduction. I watched DJ silently inspecting the capsules and wondered if when he’s grown he’ll remember this day, the blue of the lake, the flurry of robins we watched from the tower, the hike, the deer, the silly songs, the very end of a season. And I wondered if when he recognizes this seed pod in autumns of his future he will remember the quiet moment with me when he first met the bittersweet vine.

Amy L Jenkins holds a MFA in Literature and Creative Writing from Bennington College. She teaches writing at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI and serves as editor for www.anthologiesonline.com . Her work has appeared in multiple magazines, newspapers, and anthologies including Wisconsin Academy Review, Flint Hills Review, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Florida Review, Earth Island Journal, Generations, Rosebud, Women on Writing, and the recent Seal Press release The Maternal is Political.

“All the research I’ve done just shows his adopted parents – Edward and Sarah Shepard. There’s no public record of his natural parents. The papers were sealed by the courts when he was adopted. So you know who his real mother was … and his father?”

Yeah, I know. Maybe I’m only one of two who does, probably am, I bet.

“So who were they?”

Now listen. This you got to get right. I know how you sports writers are … twisting things around but this … this is important. You got to put it down just like I’m going to tell you. Got it?

“I will.”

Don’t shit me. I want you to write it down just like it happened or otherwise I’m going to come after you with one of my trophy bats and crack open your Ivy League head.

“Jesse, take it easy. I give you my word. I have no reason to distort anything. I told you from the start this is your story, not mine.”

All right, but just do it!

“I will, I promise. Now his parents … can you tell me about his parents? Please …”

Can’t tell you much about his father. Shep was four when his dad died. He told me he was a big guy, but gentle. A real baseball nut – White Sox fan. Bought Shep his first glove. Taught him how to throw a ball, hold a bat and swing it.

“When did he tell you this?”

On the plane. He asked me to go with him the night he called about his mother. I said sure, I’d go. I knew he wasn’t close enough to anybody else and didn’t want to be alone. But it was a big secret – didn’t want me to tell a soul. Nothing about any of it. He even made me swear to it.

“So you went to his mother’s funeral?”

That’s what I thought at first but when I met him at the airport the next morning he said no. Said his mother died a month ago. Just heard about it, and we were going to her gravesite.

“Where did you go?”

Indiana. We flew into Indianapolis, rented a car and drove north for an hour or so – outside some small town. There was a graveyard – kind of run down. Across the road from it was this old brick building.

“That’s where she was when she died,” he tells me.

“The hospital?” I ask, because that’s what it looked like to me.

“Yes. But a special kind … for the mentally ill.” I didn’t really know what to make of it so I kept my mouth shut. He thought because I didn’t say nothing, I didn’t get it. “The insane,” he says. “Do you understand, Jesse? She was crazy.”

I just nodded. He didn’t have any flowers. Didn’t cry. Just stared at that small little headstone. Rose Christensen – that’s what was written on it. I had no idea what he was thinking then. Not that I ever really had a good bead on that, not ever.

I started to shake. It was cold, not freezing cold, but a damp kind of cold that gets into your joints. The sky was gray. Everything seemed gray.

“Let’s go,” he says, “we’ve got another stop to make.” And then he asked me if I was okay. I told him I was just getting chilled a bit that’s all.

“But don’t worry about me,” I tell him. “Are you all right?”

“No.” That’s all he said. I didn’t think he was.

We drove another hour or so all through farm country, pretty remote. Didn’t talk much. I figured if he wanted to say something he would and I didn’t feel like prying. Poor bastard, I kept thinking, but he didn’t look like that sad son-of-a-bitch I thought he would. He looked … disturbed, kind of cranked up, but like it was walled inside him.

I remember we drove past a sign that read Thornton. I guess it was a little after that he made a right turn and we were on a dirt road. It ended by a dilapidated farmhouse. It was boarded up and looked like no one had lived there for years, but the land around it must have been worked – you could tell. There was a barn, too. It was in worse shape than the farmhouse. Part of the roof was caved in.

“Where are we?” I ask him.

“At the beginning,” he answers.

He was always like that … short; know what I mean, in what he said? But that day, it sounded stranger than usual.

“C’mon,” he says, “let’s go in.”

“It’s all boarded up, Shep.” I tell him. “We can’t go in.”

He got out of the car, popped the trunk, and took out the tire iron and started to pull apart the wood boards that were nailed across the front door. Sort of reminded me of the S