So We Can Glow

by Leesa Cross-Smith

  “Good boy,” she said. She heard the young man two aisles over turn on the noisy machine and begin waxing the floor. “Sailing” by Christopher Cross was piping from the speakers and the produce sprinklers hushed on. Astrid held her pale palm underneath the water.

  “Supermarkets and yacht rock seem to go hand in hand,” Henry said, looking up.

  She nodded. “I came from ballet,” she added, liking how it made her seem interesting.

  “Do you do ballet to yacht rock?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said, laughing.

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Have a good week, Henry,” Astrid said, steering her cart away.

  “Hey!” he said behind her.

  She turned around.

  “You too,” he said.

  * * *

  The days in between were becoming painful for Astrid. She wished every day were Wednesday. She found herself checking her phone for texts from him, then remembering he didn’t have her number. She didn’t even know his last name. She Googled the name Henry to see what came up and fell down a rabbit hole of Henry Cavill fan sites, pictures of him in his Superman costume, YouTube clips of his interviews. She found him cloyingly handsome. Saccharine. His jawline, and those perfectly white teeth in a neat row like some kind of fence. He didn’t seem real. Not as real as Cabbage Henry. She went to bed thinking about him. Woke up wondering if he was thinking about her. Spent Thursday trying to convince herself she wasn’t crazy. Spent Friday convincing herself she was.

  * * *

  The next Wednesday night, Henry was in a white T-shirt and jeans and so was Astrid.

  “This is embarrassing,” Henry said, pointing to himself, then to her.

  “You have good taste,” she said, smiling.

  “What do you have for me this week?” Henry asked. Astrid was sad. This was all they’d ever be. He’d only ask her for recipes, never invite her to eat. He’d never ask her to get a coffee in the little grocery store café or ask for her phone number. Did love feel like this too? Like an empty cup?

  “Sweet or savory?” she asked.

  “How about this…would you like to get a coffee? Over here?” He pointed. “And maybe help me with cheese? I think I want to focus on cheese,” he said.

  One aisle over, the young man was waxing the floor with the noisy machine.

  The light in her heart flickered on, the loneliness scattering to the corners. Yes! Sometimes love felt like this too—like grocery store coffee. Like cheese and a knife. Maybe. No, yes. Yes, they would most certainly get married in the produce section on a Wednesday night. Astrid, teary-eyed, in her after-ballet clothes, holding a misted bouquet of bok choy and curly kale and rainbow chard. And after Henry put the peach-pit ring on her finger, she would put a cold strawberry in his hand at the exact moment the produce sprinklers turned on. The grocery store manager would click on “Celebration” by Kool & The Gang. The young man would turn off the noisy machine so they could hear the music better. They’d name their baby boy Apricot. Their twin girls, Persimmon and Plum. But, first! Henry and Astrid would get a cake from the bakery and go home together, eat it in bed. Yes, love would sound like “Africa” by Toto, thumping and thumping. Lust was heady at first, but quickly turned bitter and left her thirstier. Ravenous. But, love! Love should feel like being full. Love should feel like, taste like—sweet white buttercream and coconut slathered and tightening all over her like paint, sweet white buttercream and coconut filling her mouth.

  When It Gets Warm

  Finding their way through all that winter clothing was as complicated as trying to land a plane in a hurry, Paul joked. Even the mention of flying made Beth anxious. She focused on getting out of her coat and buttons and buttons and zippers and clasps. Her wool sweater, long, soft-flannel sleeves. Once they got down to it, it was blue-ribbon married sex. As comforting as a whistling teapot, the smell of a hardware store. Cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning.

  After, Paul went out for some real food. Their plan was to eat the sushi in their room, in secret. Clean and sneak the empty plastic boxes back home in their flowered luggage so the nice woman who owned the B&B wouldn’t be offended. Paul had gone to Whole Foods for spicy tuna and ebi, little packages of electric-green wasabi, slivers of tacky, pickled ginger.

  Beth was alone in the room. She eyed Paul’s copy of From Russia with Love on the nightstand and picked it up, read a bit. Made sure to put the bookmark exactly where he’d left it. She looked through her suitcase, wondering if she’d packed a ribbon. The woman in the book was in bed wearing nothing but a black velvet ribbon around her neck. Maybe she could do that later. Paul loved surprises, especially ones that began or ended with her naked.

  He’d been gone for an hour, when it should’ve taken fifteen minutes. The roads were no doubt freezing over. She called his phone, no answer. She threw on a cardigan and went downstairs, made small talk with Martha, the nice woman who owned the B&B. Martha offered her hot chocolate with marshmallows. Beth took it. Martha pointed toward the glossy magazines fanned in the middle of the coffee table, but Beth didn’t feel like reading. She was busy considering life without Paul.

  Maybe he’d gotten into an accident, was somewhere dying in the snow, his last gasping breaths smoke-puffing out into the fucking depressing black nothingness of a January night. She checked her phone for the weather, saw it was five degrees. Five. She tried calling Paul again, no answer. Sent him two texts:

  why is it taking you so long i’m worried about you

  it’s so cold, i love you

  Beth imagined their boys growing up without a father. How could she do this to them? Have them? Bring them into this awful world where their mother or father could die at any moment and leave them alone? The monster of a panic attack gripped her shoulders, opened its mouth to devour her.

  She closed her eyes and prayed, begged God to calm her down. Relax, relax, she thought, matching her heartbeat-thumps. She drank her hot chocolate. Walked over to the front windows to look out. Nothing. Cars sleeping in the parking lot. Snow and ice.

  Martha asked where her husband went. Beth lied and told her he’d gone out for juice.

  “Oh, he shouldn’t have done that. We have plenty of juice here,” Martha said.

  “We didn’t want to bother you,” Beth said, smiling as much as she could.

  “Well, if you want anything else please come down and ask me. It’s my job and I enjoy it,” Martha said.

  “Thank you. The hot chocolate is really good.” Beth nodded.

  She wouldn’t feel right wearing bright colors for at least a year after Paul’s funeral. No thin, dandelion-yellow vintage summer dresses; no grosgrain carrot-orange ribbons in her hair. Grief was a foggy liver-color seen through a glass, darkly.

  Beth started to cry but didn’t want Martha to see her, so she took her hot chocolate and headed for the stairs. She’d try to call Paul again. If he wasn’t back soon she’d call the police, call her mother. Ask someone if she could borrow their car and go looking for him herself.

  She heard the bell tinkle against the door and turned to see Paul in his hat, his puffed black jacket and red-laced hiking boots. He was holding a brown paper bag by the handles. It crinkled. He smiled up at her, stomped off snow.

  Boy Smoke

  My big sister, Tula, says her boyfriend, Finn, and his best friend, Kahlil, want us to go for a ride with them. I have a secret crush on Finn. Finn is a senior and quarterback-tall. He got suspended from the football team last week—weed and four Ds on his report card. His dad is the pastor of our church. Whenever I smell communion wafers and baptism pools, I think of Finnegan Grand.

  “Kahlil likes you. That’s why he wants you to come with us,” Tula says. We’re at the end of our driveway waiting for the boys to pick us up. She puts on sugar-raspberry lipgloss and hands it to me so I can put it on too.

  “He’s a’ight,” I say after I rub my lips together.

  “Here they come,” she says, looking down the ro
ad.

  Kahlil drives a dark green four-door wagon and stops it in front of our house so we can get in the back. He and Finn turn around and say hey. Finn reaches back and holds Tula’s hand for a second. I stare at the side of Kahlil’s face to see if I can tell if he likes me or not. I come up empty.

  Finn wants to ride past Coach Cahill’s house. They promise they aren’t going to do anything to it.

  “I’m in enough trouble with my parents,” he says, lighting a cigarette and rolling down the window.

  “And if we egged his shit, he’d know it was us anyway,” Kahlil adds.

  “Ruby, do you smoke?” Kahlil asks me.

  “Cigarettes?” I ask, all flirty, hoping it will ricochet and wound Finn with bloody love for me.

  “She’s never smoked anything,” Tula says, splitting her hair and pulling it to make her ponytail tighter. Finn hands her his cigarette.

  “That’s cool,” Finn says, turning to smile at me through the tiny crack between the headrest and the car door. I want the sharp, dark tobacco taste of his mouth; I want to sleep in his soft T-shirts like Tula does. He gave her a pearl ring she only takes off for tennis practice. That’s when I put it on, pretend like he gave it to me.

  Coach Cahill’s front door is wide open and Kahlil slows down. Finn tells him to stop.

  “What the?” Kahlil says.

  The porch bulb casts spaceship-light on the night grass. Coach is gathering a pile of clothes in his arms.

  “Damn. His wife is throwing all his shit out,” Finn says, opening his door.

  Coach’s wife comes outside. She has a baby on her hip. I get a hot, itchy feeling in my gut thinking about how scared that baby must be.

  “Go back in the house!” Coach hollers to her.

  “You can’t tell me shit anymore!” his wife hollers back.

  “Coach?” Finn says, standing in the swimmy milk of the headlights.

  I look over at Tula, watch her toss the cigarette. I chew on my thumb.

  “What are you doing here?” Coach asks Finn. Coach’s shadowed shoulders droop in embarrassment like a robot powering down.

  Kahlil kills the engine and lights, gets out of the car. The boys bend, start picking up stuff in the yard.

  Coach’s wife walks over to us. She leans her head through the driver’s side window.

  “You girls shouldn’t be here,” she says like a mom.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “We just came out for a ride,” Tula says.

  “I don’t know what to do,” his wife says, shaking her head. Her face looks like a country song: smudged black eyeliner, red wine teeth.

  “Do you want a cigarette? We can hold the baby in here so y’know…he doesn’t smell the smoke,” Tula says, pointing to Finn’s pack of cigarettes on the passenger seat.

  Coach’s wife reaches in and gets one. Tula opens her door and holds her arms out for the baby. She puts him on her lap, gently pets his head. I smile at him, let him grab my fingers.

  “What are your names?” I ask.

  “He’s Max and I’m Nina,” Coach’s wife says, snapping to normal in the way that only women can when they’re holding up the Earth. Nina says thanks to us and smokes at the front of the car, standing there like a crownless queen in streetlamp light. We watch the boys clean up the yard. They look like animals.

  Dandelion Light

  Your eyes are two different colors. Heterochromia, you tell me. I tell you I like that word and you ask what other words I like. Cartographer, I say. And I tell you I can draw a map to you. There are a lot of men here and I can drink wine, I say when you ask me what I am talking about, what I am doing. I put my glass on the table and take a pen from my purse, grab a stiff hay-colored cocktail napkin from the top of the stack. I draw a small skull and crossbones, a fat heart, the outline of Kentucky—a crazy jagged, pointed elf’s shoe with no foot. You ask me what it means and I tell you I forgot the X so I draw it. Write YOU ARE HERE underneath. I cross everything out one by one and throw the napkin away after I kiss it and finish the rest of my wine. You are slightly buzzed. I can tell by the way you don’t shake your head when you tell me I am a piece of work. And the c sound in the word piece doesn’t snake out as slick as it should. It sounds like your tongue tripped and stumbled out of a thick, rustling bush at night with its eyes closed, its hands straight out in front of it, feeling for anything.

  We’ve met before. No one is surprised when we leave the party together and walk and walk and walk. The neighborhood smells like everyone’s laundry and dinner. I have terrible allergies. I even moved to Arizona to try to fix them, but it didn’t work, I say. Our arms reek of peppery-lemon citronella, stolen sprays from the bottle of DEET-free bug repellent by the back door. This neighborhood is rife with mosquitoes, I warned you. And I know where we are going. I am leading you to wet grasses and backyard clover. We lie watching the evening clouds and listening as if we can hear them click into place, watch the curved world shift from simmering-sunset light to firefly light. Moonlight, starlight when you devour me like I am a sweet, little cake—worship me like I am a cooling token in your hot-hot hand or a prehistoric translucent-winged insect in a perfect square of warm, clear amber. Something you could slip a string through and wear around your neck for good luck. Tonight I am your amulet, the bundle of snapped branches long burned white.

  Our first official date isn’t even a date, it’s a science experiment, you say when you’re as sober as a kitten. We fell asleep in the vegetable garden. I don’t know what time it is and I don’t care. I tell you I hate science and shrug when you ask if you can see me again. Smile when I say stay here because you are seeing me now. You are slipping a flower behind my ear when I tell you I’m hungry. We go inside my house, clatter in the kitchen. I pull a white paper box of chicken from the refrigerator. I wilt spinach and green onions in a cast-iron skillet. We sit across from one another, under the gauzy-white low-hanging kitchen table light. We clink and drink unsweetened iced tea with the little lemon bars I made the night before. Baking as therapy, I say. I tell you that a year ago, my husband and I moved back to Kentucky from Arizona and got a divorce and now, he already has a new wife and our twin daughters are with them for the weekend. I tell you my daughters’ hair is like blackbird feathers and I hook my thumbs to make bird wings with my hands. How am I drunk when I only had one glass of wine? I laugh but we both know I am not drunk, I am sad. And tonight those words can mean the same thing. So can man and friend. Kiss and talk. We use our mouths and tongues for both of them, don’t we?

  Your phone rings and I’m sure it’s your wife. Sure you’ve been lying about everything. You answer and I turn away from you, an attempt at gifting you a private moment. I get up from the table, take our dishes to the sink, wash them by hand. The faucet water sounds like rain.

  It’s your daughter. She needs a ride. She got in a fight with her mom. You say they do this all the time…this is what they do…I better go get her…they always end up scratching each other. You make a small claw with your hand, scratch at the air. You tell me you were never married. You tell me your daughter is very thirteen. You slip your phone back into your pocket when you say it, slip your hand in too. I tell you I understand…my daughters are very eleven. I say you can drive my car and when we get downtown, the sun is coming up. Your daughter has been crying and her long, wet eyelashes are black butterfly wings behind the slight lens magnification of her thickish red-framed glasses. She is beautiful and short and brown. Zaftig. You tell her I’m your friend, I let you drive my car. You drive it to your place and when we go inside you make a big pot of coffee. I drink it black out of an auto body shop mug. I never drink it black, but I don’t want to bother you by mentioning soy milk and stevia because you don’t seem like the kind of guy who has heard of either and I like that. You point at the mug and tell me you used to work there. I look closely at the design and see your name at the bottom written in white cursive. Above it, there is a drawing of a half-naked woman with huge
pointy tits. She is resting on the crushed bumper of a broken car. It’s so stupid it makes me laugh and makes you laugh too. Your daughter comes out of the bathroom and says she’s going to bed but then she asks what’s so funny. We try to explain, but it’s not funny anymore. Our laughter swings down slowly, reverses itself back into our mouths. You hug her and kiss her head and I tell her goodbye, that I hope I see her again soon. Maybe. I tell her how much I like you and the confession feels like an accident. Like stubbing my toe.

  I finally walk onto the porch to leave and you hold the mug out for me. Tell me to keep it. I hug it to my chest like it’s a baby animal. You ask if you can kiss me and I say why do men ask—either do it or don’t. And you say you are a gentleman, that you are only being polite and I say we’ve already kissed and like, done things, so I don’t know if it counts anymore. I whisper yes, gentleman, please kiss me. You do. You kiss me with the deliberateness of carefully pouring acid from one beaker to another—the slightest mistake and we could have a Situation. This chirping summer morning, ever so surely our catalyst.

  When I get home I text, hey you left your socks. You write me back, wow I didn’t realize I took them off and ask if you can call me later. I write, yes, gentleman. I tell you I will take off all of my clothes and put on your striped socks and sleep in them to keep them warm. You send me a word you like: erstwhile. I send you summer afternoon.

  Cellar door.

  Dandelion light.

  California, Keep Us

  Marco had this idea that twelve times a year, we go away. We leave here. We don’t tell anyone what we’re doing or where we’re going—it’s no one else’s business. The first time? He’d mailed a typewritten letter to our house. It’d gotten here on the first day of his business trip. Marco is a very capable man, rational, a planner. He’d flown from Kentucky to LA. I hadn’t expected to see him until after the weekend and I was busy too. His letter was addressed to Miss K. Huff, traveling. He’d used my maiden name. Inside the envelope was a plane ticket and a letter: