Mornings With AJ and Jen

by Thomas Cannon

with you personally—”

  “But give us a chance, now.” Jenny had been going on with the conversation just to buy time until the police could come in and shoot him. But like Kevin, she had seen too little of her daughter. And just as Adam was shy without the transmitter tower and more significantly, without her; Jenny’s heart would freeze without Adam to keep it thawed. They had discussed it. Decided they were like a peanut butter and mayo sandwich. An absurd combination that was somehow great. “Give me a chance.”

  “Don’t,” Kevin shouted and pointed the gun at her. She walked up to him so that he had to pull the gun back. She looked him in the eye. In Kevin, she saw herself without Adam.

  She reached out and took the gun.

  Hammerschlagen

  Maggie tosses her cigarettes into the same ditch on her way to work.  To get them in the exact spot, she powers her window down, adjusts for wind and speed, and flicks the still burning butts off her finger like a paper football.  They are coffin nails and that’s how she likes to think of them there- a growing pile of rough hewn spikes.

  It gives her something to concentrate on for a few moments so that she doesn’t think of her affair.    But it’s a long ride and it still provides herself plenty of time to punish herself by looking at the picture hanging from her rear view mirror of herself and Chet.  As if by watching it twist, she can figure out why she did such a thing.  She sees the handsomeness and sweetness of Chet.  Still, she knows she is a tall, thin blonde with almond eyes and he is balding and pockmarked.

  She also knows she looks better than when they got married ten years ago.  She knew nothing then of hair care or wearing make-up and has become a fanatic about working out and reducing her caloric intake.  But it makes her think of Easter eggs.  As a kid, her friends would bring in pastel-colored eggs in their lunch.  They would peel away the shell and sink their teeth into the soft shimmering egg white while she watched.  Her mother always hollowed out their Easter eggs.  She felt like one of those eggs.  Easy to display, but with nothing inside.

  Chet walks through the annual festival and into the beer tent run by the Blister Sisters.  That is the name they came up for themselves after being in the house fire that killed their dad.  Bobbi is sometimes considered the lucky one because Helen has skin grafts on her face and upper body while she mostly just had grafts on her legs and back.  But they tell people, “There aint no good place for a graft” and it doesn’t seem to matter to them.  They have a ball together running their bar Chunk’s and the beer tent during the festival and county fair.

  “Bobbi, I’ll have a tapper,” Chet says to the nearest sister behind the makeshift bar.

  She pours the beer, but then looks at him for a moment before setting it down.  “Chet Anderson.  We haven’t seen you since you got married.  Hey, Helen, get your crispy kester over here.  Remember Chet here?”

  Helen is pouring ice into a galvanized water tank they use for bottled beer.  “Well, what the hell. Good to see you, but you’re not one of those guys that lost their women and has come skulking around us are ya?  Because we’re too picky for rebounders.”

  “Yeah right, sister.”

  “Well, who cares, anyway?”

  Chet sips his beer and the sisters scan the nearly empty tent.  “I’m still married,” he says.

  “Good for you, Chet,” Helen says.  “Cause that Maggie is a looker.”

  Even though she is crying, Maggie still times everything just right so that she can flick her cigarette out onto her nicotine burial mound.  She pictures how eventually she will have a mountain of cigarette butts in that spot.  She spends a lot of time thinking up reasons to go into town on her days off just to get her pile built up.  She is distant now and Chet thinks it is all about her hysterectomy.  She does have trouble dealing with the fact she and Chet will never have kids.  What gets to her though was that she had been pregnant and a mistake had led to another mistake.  Mostly likely Chet had not been the father.

  Chet watches a group of people standing around a game in the corner of the beer tent.  They have thrown money down on a thick cross section of a tree and are playing a game where you win if you hit a nail all the way into the wood with one hammer blow.  Without taking a sip of his beer, he walks over to the group.

  A lobster-red guy in a tank top is laughing as he stands with his hammer.  With the guy’s sunglasses setting on the bill of his cap, Chet sees the un-suntanned rings around his eyes and circles the group, trying to figure out why these people seemed to think he is great.  “Hey Scotty, watch this.”  “Nice one, Scotty,” they are constantly saying.  The whole group is too loud for Chet.

  “That’s Scotty Wilson with all his buddies,” Bobbi tells Chet when he assumes his spot where he had bought his beer.

  “I know,” Chet answers.

  Chet feels Maggie get out of bed.  He listens to the shower and the rattling bathroom fan go on.  He reaches over and turns the clock radio on because he knows she hit the snooze button instead of the alarm off.  As she dresses by her closet, he keeps his back to her.  He knows she has her back to him and will put her underwear on first before removing the towel.  If he were to open his eyes and face her, he would see her freckled and wet shoulders.

  He knows that Scotty goes to the beer tent every day of the festival.  He is also sure that he is the one Maggie cheated with.

  At work, Maggie bathes one of the clients with dementia.  No one else is able to work with her and she can’t figure out how she can still be a good nurse despite her life being in shambles.  She knows it’s easier to give to them than it is to give to Chet. She can see their pain that makes them angry and ugly.  She doesn’t want to see Chet’s because it is her. 

  Midmorning, the daughter of the difficult client catches her in the hallway.  “Maggie, thanks for taking care of Mom.  She’d be a lot worse if it wasn’t for you.” 

  “Everyone here loves Ethel,” she says to make the daughter feel better.  The compliment makes her smile but also weighs heavy on her.  

  “Bullshit, Maggie.  I hear them talk and see them when they work with her.  They hate her and she can tell.  But you keep her alive.”

  Chet catches up with Bobbi and Helen while waiting for Scotty to come in.  He takes glimpses of their mottled skin.  Areas not covered by their Chunk’s T-shirts and cut-off jeans look like somebody scooped out their muscles with an ice-cream scoop.  While they both had been pretty in high school, people could tell that Helen would be the better looking one now if it wasn’t for the scaring on her face.  At one point, though, Helen tells Chet, “People think it’s terrible.  But this is me now.  It’s who I am so what can I do?”

  Because it is the afternoon of a weekday, no other customers are in the tent.  A few men come in to get a beer to set in the drink holder of the stroller while they take their kids to the games and rides, but otherwise there is an awkward silence under the tent.  The sisters have a policy of not talking about personal stuff unless their customers begin it, so they do not ask Chet the quiet guy from high school why he is there nursing a few beers .

  Scotty’s group comes in drunk and orders some pitchers from the hammer game corner.  Chet goes over to them..“Can I get in?”

  The game operator has ambled over from his camper outside the tent and hands him a hammer so he can play against Scotty.  Chet feels the hammer, heavy in his hand and tosses a twenty on the stump.  “Enough to buy some suntan lotion,” he says, but no one gets what he says.

  To win the game, contestants toss the hammer in the air to prevent aiming and then try to drive their nail all the way in.  In unison, Scotty and Chet toss their hammers in the air.

  On the way home, Maggie swerves into the other lane like she sometimes does to toss her cigarette out, but doesn’t drive back into her lane.  Instead she waits for the semi on a hill a mile away.  Getting into the car, she decided she couldn’t bear to have
Chet pretend to be asleep one more morning.  She couldn’t bear to listen to Elvis sing “Suspicious Minds” on the oldies station.  She really couldn’t pretend anymore that she didn’t hear him call out her name as she headed towards the kitchen.

  Up ahead she sees a group of kids in garden gloves and plastic bags along the highway.  In time, they will discover her cache of tossed cigarettes, the burial mound of her pain, and there will be nothing left of it.  Gone in a few handfuls.

  She sees how she has been holding on to things that can’t be stockpiled.  For one last time, she lets herself think, I would have had a daughter.

  The kids in their orange vests watch her pull back into her lane.

  Her next thought is of Ethel.  She thinks of Helen thanking her for taking care of her mother and then Bobbi visiting that morning and talking about seeing Chet yesterday.  She had said something about Chet watching Scotty Wilson.

  Chet holds his hammer high.  Higher than he would ever need it to play the game.  Despite his plan, despite his pain, Chet freezes when he sees Maggie in the tent.

  “Chet,” she yells.  Then she says his name again.  “Chet.”

  Mac & Cheese

  Through her wet, white T-shirt, I can see her large aureoles. They don’t make me think of sex, though, but of hummed lullabies and macaroni and cheese. What