The tree house was, according to Helen, Kenny’s “sacred space,” so they’d trudged there together, dragging their shovels and doubting they’d get it all done before dark.
Sacred space or not, the gods were not on their side. The earth was hard and the tree sent a tough network of roots through the ground, many as thick as Shellie’s upper arm. Getting through the grass was the first struggle. The clods came up in small pieces, dirt and grass mixed with rock and the bones of some small animal.
“Chips,” Shellie said when she uncovered a jaw and some teeth. “Kenny’s dog.”
Then came the roots and the clay. They dug in jerky stops and starts, hunched over like the old ladies they would someday become.
“I’m not sure we should be doing this,” Ruby said, resting her shovel against the tree trunk. Her fat cheeks were pink and greasy with sweat.
“It’s sacrilegious.” Una daintily scraped dirt off her saddle shoe.
“Sacrilegious,” Peggy repeated.
A bunch of wusses, Shellie thought. All talk and no action. Typical Marxist claptrap. “Oh come on, you guys. There’s nothing in the Bible that says, ‘Thou shalt not bury your dead in your own backyard.’”
They were silent for a while, long enough for a truck full of teenagers to honk by and an owl to hoot at them from the woods where the shadow of a waning crescent moon was rising. Shellie supposed they were quite a sight, a bunch of middle-aged women digging a grave on a Saturday night. No one was dressed for the job, especially Una and Ruby, who rarely wore pants. Their veiny calves had constellations of mud on them now. Peggy’s nails were broken, every one. Shellie knew she had dirt in her hair. She could feel the grittiness itching at her scalp. She missed Buff. And she missed her daughter. Who her daughter used to be, anyway.
“I haven’t seen Brianna in four days,” she said. “I’m worried she might be in some sort of trouble.”
The owl hooted twice more and the wind picked up, bringing a chill.
“She won’t talk to me,” Shellie said. “She hardly ever comes home. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Una wiped her face on her skirt and mumbled, “She’s sleeping with Josh Seaver.”
“Excuse me?”
“And she’s stripping at Miss Kitty’s.”
“How do you know this?”
“Heard it at the Hair Barn.”
“Oh,” Shellie said, shifting her shovel from one hand to the other. “So it must be true.”
“Well,” Una said. “Yeah.”
Shellie knew she was right. In her heart, in her aching back, she knew.
Up in the air, the tree house creaked, and the moon, shrinking to a sliver, reminded them that Kenny was gone. Gone from them forever.
“Let’s keep digging,” Ruby said. “None of us is getting any younger.”
* * *
The hole was almost finished, so they took a break. Una had to pee. Peggy was thirsty. Ruby said her sciatica was acting up. They headed straight for the house, all but Shellie, who took a detour through Helen’s flower garden. The peonies were out. Pink, fragrant. Brianna’s favorite flower. Or had been. What was Brianna’s favorite anything now? Shellie brushed the velvety blossoms, remembered the feel of her daughter’s baby skin, the heat of her cheek when in fever. You wouldn’t have children, wouldn’t even think about it, if you knew how it would all turn out.
She stopped outside the kitchen window, glancing in at Helen, who seemed to be blessing Kenny in some way, wafting a round incense holder over his face and chanting a low song while she circled him.
The kitchen was smoky and growing dark. Helen and Ruby stood near the body, which was so still Shellie had the sensation of moving forward even though her feet were planted on the ground. Una appeared from the hallway, holding a long, thin sewing needle. It glinted in the candlelight and trailed an almost translucent pink thread. Helen stepped back and nodded at Una, who, expertly and with grace, removed the glass beads from Kenny’s eyes and stitched his heavy lids shut.
“Would you look at that,” Shellie whispered.
Peggy sidled up next to her, shivering as she pulled a sweater over her shoulders. Shellie was sure she’d say, Would you look at that, but instead she silently tugged at her ponytail.
When Helen started blowing out the candles one by one, Shellie touched Peggy on the shoulder and the two of them went in. It was time. Shellie knew all about this part, the lowering, the sealing up, the sheer finality of the thing that was like all the air being sucked out of the world.
She headed straight into the kitchen, crouched down next to the coffin in the corner, and motioned for Peggy and Una and Ruby to join her. Together they pulled the pine box out from behind the refrigerator and over to the table. It squawked over the lumpy linoleum, the lid flopping open against its side as they positioned it, sanded to gold and smelling of Christmas, next to Kenny. Helen did not cry. She leaned down over Kenny’s face and kissed each cheek. She rubbed his arms and stroked his hands and pushed one stray hair off his forehead.
And because the others got weepy then, because they crumpled like Kleenexes, it was Shellie who moved to the bottom of the table and took Kenny’s feet. They were cold and smooth and hairless. She remembered helping him learn to tie his shoes. He was terrible at it. So terrible Helen had to buy him Velcro for years.
Shellie looked at her friend. “Ready?” she said.
A few flowers fell to the floor.
Helen gripped the pillow under Kenny’s head and took a deep breath.
“Go.”
Elderly Care
(June)
It was time for Star Trek: The Next Generation but Tiara said she was sick of that show and why couldn’t they watch something normal for a change?
“What’s normal?” Fikus asked. “Hannah Wyoming?”
“It’s Hannah Montana and anyway I hate that white trash bitch.”
“Hey. Simmer down, and watch your language while you’re at it.”
Fikus lit a healing spirit candle and watched it sputter. He had a bad feeling. He often had a bad feeling, but he was beginning to wonder if maybe something had gone wrong in the astral plane. A disturbance, maybe, in the desire stuff. That could explain it. A wave of unreckoning in the abode of the dead. Fikus said a small prayer for his father and his mother and for Daisy Gonzalez. He finished with a prayer for himself. He’d lost his dairy bus-driving gig when it was shut down and his school route when Daisy went missing. Money was very short just now. So was the spirit candle. Most of it was just a purple puddle on the plate.
“You got a bigger bowl or something?” Tiara asked.
Fikus would rummage through his cupboards again but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. “That’s my biggest.”
“Maybe if he had more room to breathe.”
“He’s a fish. He’s fine.” But Fikus said a fifth prayer, this one for Tiara’s fish, Murphy, because he had to admit that the thing—a sort of pale goldfish-like creature with pink eyes and a blue-tipped tail—looked listless. It hung out in the bottom of the orange cereal bowl and didn’t flutter his fins much.
“He ain’t swimming. That’s not a good sign,” Tiara said.
“Not all fish swim constantly, you know,” Fikus said. He checked the oven to see if he’d put in the tater tots. The oven was full of pans. He pulled them out and set them on top of the stove, knocking a six-pack of Gatorade Frost to the floor. The bottles just missed his big toe. “What do you want with your tots?”
“Hmm?” Tiara was plunking the bowl’s side and making fishy faces at the water. Her necklace hit the bowl and made a sound like a bell. “C’mon, Murphy. You can do it. You can live. For me. Swim, goddamn you.”
She’d brought the fish over as a present of sorts, something to take Fikus’s mind off his guilt over Daisy Gonzalez’s disappearance and his subsequent lack of employment. Fikus appreciated the gesture a lot more than he appreciated the fish. The last thing he needed was something to take care of. Ju
st look what happened to Daisy when he should have been taking care of her. And who knew what might happen to Tiara if he didn’t put a stop to her almost daily visits.
Like Fikus, Tiara lived in Maple Leaf Mobile Home Park. She and her mother were two trailers up B Street in a white single-wide with blue trim and a faded picket fence out front. Hardly a day went by that Tiara didn’t show up at Fikus’s door armed with something—a homework assignment she couldn’t figure out, a videotape she’d “borrowed” from her mother about an obscure disease, an actual gun. Well, an actual water pistol, but Fikus couldn’t tell—they looked so realistic now—and he’d screamed and put his hands in the air. “Pow,” Tiara said as she pulled the trigger. Nothing came out.
At first when Tiara started coming by he worried what her mother would think, and so over and over he’d sent her home, telling her to find some friends her own age. “I see you on the bus,” he’d said, shutting the door in her angry face. “That’s plenty.”
For a while she stayed away and Fikus was proud of himself. He’d finally managed to put his foot down. But he was also lonely and had to admit that when he heard her knock again on a gray evening in February he was glad. Sure, he’d have to tell her to go away, but at least someone wanted to see him, even if it was a foulmouthed little girl. “I’m not a complete and utter pariah,” he told himself. “Pariah. Pariah should rhyme with tiara, but it doesn’t. Funny world. Funny kid.” He thought he might let her in, if only so she could warm her paws over the space heater.
But that day it wasn’t Tiara on his front stoop. It was her mother. Fikus had seen her a number of times around the trailer park but they’d never officially been introduced. She had a thin face and purple lips and elegant hands, and sometimes, when Fikus passed her house, he’d crane his neck for a glimpse of her, hoping to catch her outside, talking to a neighbor, gesturing. The way she stirred the air. He thought she could be an orchestra conductor if she wanted to, but Tiara said, “Nuh-uh. You crazy? She’s a nurse.”
Fikus tried to remember her name. Cheyenne? Charlene? Either one would have suited her well. She had a tough brand of beauty.
“What do you have against my baby?” she’d asked him. She had on a man’s winter coat and ski pants and heavy rubber boots. Her hands were shoved into purple mittens.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, what do you have against my baby?”
“Tiara?”
“The one and only.”
“I, well, I—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ward. Tiara didn’t tell me you had a stammer.”
“I … I don’t. I just—”
“Yes?” Mittened hand on hip.
“I don’t have anything against her. Why would you say that?”
“She told me that she’s been trying since January to get you to let her in—‘Mama, he’s just a lonely old man with only some candles and crystals for company,’ she says—but that every time, every time, you slam the door in her face. I ask you, is that any way to treat a little girl who’s just trying to get her elderly care merit badge?”
“Her what?”
Frustrated exhalation. Large brown eyes rolled skyward. “Would you do me the favor of letting Tiara pay a call on you? All she needs to get the badge—she’s just one step away from full Buttercup Girl status—is to visit with you and write a report about what you did together. She could make you hot cocoa or something. Organize your pills by color. Watch Matlock with you. I really don’t care. Just let her in the door, for God’s sake.”
“I would have. I just … I thought you wouldn’t like it.”
“Because she’s a girl and you’re a weird loner old man?”
Fikus nodded, blushing. He didn’t like hearing himself described in such a way by such a pretty mouth, but he couldn’t argue with the assessment.
“Do you plan on molesting my daughter?”
“What?” Fikus blushed harder. Sweat beaded out on his face and ran down his back, ice cold. “Of course not.”
“You’re a bus driver for the school, so that means, I hope, that they’ve done an extensive criminal background check on your ass.”
“Yes. I suppose they have.”
“Tiara’s a smart girl, a tough girl. If you so much as tried anything remotely fishy she would claw your eyes out. I trust her. And she wants that fucking badge, God knows why. I told her, ‘Sweetie, the Buttercups are a bunch of boring white girls,’ but whatever. What my baby wants and works for, my baby gets. I won’t have some bent geezer standing in her way. Do you understand me?”
Fikus didn’t know what a Buttercup Girl was. He’d never watched an episode of Matlock, and he didn’t take any medications, except for the occasional sleeping pill. He was on the side of natural medicine. Spiritual healing. He was also on the side of whiskey, which he probably should hide from this shrewd woman and her even shrewder child. Then again, he wasn’t sure either of them would care. They would probably say that was his problem, his funeral, same as it had been for his father. And they’d be right.
“Tell her to come on down tonight if you like,” he said.
“Not tonight. She’s got a crap-ton of math homework and math is not her best subject. We’ll be up until dawn. But tomorrow. Okay?”
“Sure,” Fikus said.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “And every day for the rest of your life.” Then she punctuated that thought with a slap on his shoulder. “Ha! I’m joking. You should see your face.”
Only it wasn’t a joke. It had been four months since that meeting on the stoop with Cheyenne (“Charlene?” Tiara had scoffed. “Are you kidding me?”), and Tiara was a fully functioning Buttercup Girl, not that she cared to go to the meetings—“All they do is make crafty things with cattails and shit. Boh-ring”—and still she insisted on visiting him. Every day. It might be for the rest of his life, too. Fikus didn’t expect to live long.
Tiara called what they did together “vegging.” For the most part they watched TV—reruns of Next Gen or Xena: Warrior Princess—or colored pictures of Hindu gods Fikus found in a bookstore in Fort Wayne. “I’d say we were meating, but that’d be dumb because you’re a vegetarian!”
She was a funny kid. There was no doubt about that. She made him laugh and now that Fikus knew there was no danger of Cheyenne reporting him to the authorities, he allowed himself to enjoy her company, particularly when they conducted their “experiments,” which usually involved throwing a bunch of about-to-expire food in the blender and mixing in dish soap or laundry detergent or whiskey—“Mama says this shit’s the devil’s brew and you don’t need it”—and then setting it on fire in the driveway. Fikus liked how no-nonsense the girl was. She seemed to smash the dreamworld he lived in, to put him right down on solid ground.
“You know these gods ain’t real, right?” she asked him once, giving Vishnu a purple face. “They’re pretty, but they’re not real. There is no God. Not really. God’s just something people invented because they’re scared of dying.”
“God is everywhere,” Fikus said. “He’s in everything.”
“You mean he’s in your nasty hair? You mean he’s in your filthy shoes? Your brown teeth? This funky dishtowel?”
Tiara tried to fix him, to tidy his house, and by inches she succeeded. His living room, which had hitherto been a mess of magazines and newspapers and whiskey bottles and half-completed crystal gardens, was now neat enough that you could see your way to the orange shag carpeting. His tabletops were dusty but there was room for a drink, and the bathroom where he kept his hanging plants was less junglelike. The garter snake who’d taken up residence on the radiator had been banished to the outdoors and the bedroom window let in light, ever since Tiara made him pull down the old newspaper he’d taped to the glass for privacy. He grew to love her, even when she called him “cray-cray nasty man,” because he knew she loved him, too.
“Should I feed him some more?” Tiara asked now.
“Murphy? How much have you already given him?”
She shrugged. “A handful?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Why?”
“Never mind. Don’t feed him anymore today. Leave him alone and come and eat your tater tots. There are carrot sticks, too.”
Tiara made a face.
“No carrots, no tots.”
“Fine.”
They ate in the kitchen because Tiara had vetoed Next Gen and because they had a good view of Fikus’s backyard bird feeders, where right then a blue jay was fighting three robins for access to the black-oil sunflower seeds. The jay was winning.
Tiara watched the scene, not saying anything for several minutes. Finally, mouth half-full of carrots, she turned her sharp eyes on Fikus. “Fikus?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you wish sometimes you lived someplace else?”
“You mean a different state? Or a different country?”
“Sort of.”
“I wouldn’t so much mind India,” he said. “Wanna see the temples there, to get to the bottom of the big questions. Second choice, Russia. I like the idea of steppes.”
“Steps? What’s so great about going up stuff?”
“Steppes. With two p’s. And an e. I think. They’re meadows. Only huge.”
“Whatever. I was talking about living someplace else in town. Other than Maple Leaf. Like, would our lives be different if we lived in Wyndham-on-the-fucking-River? Or on one of the tree streets. Peach. Elm. Maple. They sound so nice. And we live on goddamned B Street. Who came up with that? Seriously.”
“Tiara, you have to stop cussing so much.”
“Okay, okay, sorry.” She popped a tater tot into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “It’s just that I feel kind of hog-tied here.”
“Hog-tied?”
“Held back. You know. And my house isn’t a house. It’s on wheels. And my neighbors just throw their trash right out the window.”
“Well…” The girl was so bright. Most times, he had no idea how to talk to her.
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