As La Vista Turns

by Kris Ripper

  “I feel better already.” Keith wound an arm around Josh’s waist. “I felt better when I was doing up the flyers, like—I don’t know. It felt like doing something. Instead of just hoping eventually I’ll stop jumping at shadows every time I’m outside in the dark.”

  Merin eyed him from under his hood. “Yeah, but that’s you. You’re making Cam go and it doesn’t make him feel better. He wants to forget.”

  I added Talk to Cam to my mental list and tagged it urgent. I’d talked to him before, but he was with Keith at the time. Grabbing him alone was a better idea.

  Josh broke off another half of a donut. “You think he can forget that night? I was passed out through most of it and I can’t forget it for longer than a couple of hours at a stretch.”

  “I think he should be allowed to forget it if he wants to.” Merin’s voice was a little defensive, enough so I wondered what fight they were actually having, if it wasn’t about Cameron.

  “I think . . .” Keith pondered. “I guess I think part of loving a person is telling them the truth. I don’t think Cam trying to act like nothing happened is a good idea. And I can’t act like nothing happened. So you have to walk a balance between doing what you have to do, and respecting that that’s not the same for everyone.”

  “You tell them even when they don’t want to hear it?”

  Josh brushed a hand over Merin’s hood. “House policy around here. What, you didn’t notice?”

  “Hahaha, Josh.” Merin grabbed a banana. “Can I go back to painting now?”

  “If you eat that, you can.”

  Merin heaved a sigh and started peeling the banana on his way across the room.

  “He’s not supposed to be in school?” I asked when he was far enough away not to hear.

  “Oh, he is.” Josh’s eyes followed Merin. “But when he stays out all night wandering around afraid to sleep, we make exceptions.”

  “Then we text Jaq, who does her best to smooth things over at the school.”

  I shook my head. “Sometimes I think the wake is just a very small piece of a very big picture, and I can’t do a damn thing about any of it.”

  “It’s the same here,” Josh said. “We knew that going in. Only incremental changes really stick, and they’re the most frustrating ones to work on, because you constantly feel like you’re running in place.”

  “And some days are better than others,” Keith added. “Anyway, let me go get the stuff I was playing with and you can see what you like.”

  I stayed another hour, tweaking and adjusting flyers. The copy store downtown was dead empty, so I got one stack of the main flyer, and a smaller stack of the more subtle one, which had a rainbow across the bottom but was otherwise free of all queer symbolism.

  Time to track down my staple gun. Or, even better, borrow the one from work. But first: a few more meetings to earn my keep.

  I made it to the farmhouse shortly after five the following day. The sun was beginning to set, filling the whole house with orange-pink light.

  At first I thought no one was home. Until I found Emerson sitting on the back porch.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He looked up at me. Or . . . glowered up at me. “Who the fuck invited you here?”

  “No one.” I sat down, leaving a fair amount of space between us. “Is she pissed?”

  “Pissed? What’re you, new? Mildred’s not pissed. She’s not anything. She’s acting like you using her and leaving her is exactly what she’s worth, so well done there, Zane. Jesus.” His fingers twitched, and he mumbled, “Sorry, Aunt Florence.”

  “I didn’t use her.” I hadn’t. I’d definitely been a total asshole, but I hadn’t used her, that was different.

  “You fucked her and left like your ass was on fire the next morning.”

  “That was Obie’s fault.”

  His eyes narrowed. “The hell are you talking about?”

  “Listen. It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid.” I leaned over my knees, playing with the way my fingers looked in the fading light. “But that whole thing about you guys moving downstairs because we might need the bedroom . . . I freaked.”

  “Are you shitting me? Because I’ve panicked about some really stupid shit, but that’s a winner, there. And it’s Obie. That’s the way he thinks. He didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “I know.”

  He surveyed me for a long moment, eyes still dark. “If I hadn’t been meditating every fucking day all the time, I’d be really angry right now.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “So this is you serene and sedate?”

  “The difference isn’t that I don’t get pissed, it’s that me being pissed doesn’t affect my entire body.” After a second he looked away, dropping some of the aggression. “Which is better. It passes faster that way. Anyway, you’re a fucking dick, Zane. And you should be ashamed of yourself. And I hope you came here to grovel and she kicks your ass out because I can’t fucking live this way.”

  “Self-absorbed, much?”

  “Bitchy Mildred I can deal with. Depressed and putting-up-a-front Mildred is . . . disturbing. I didn’t even know she could do that.” He shuddered. “Obie says he thinks the front is for James, but I don’t know. I think it’s for herself. Anyway. You’re an asshole.”

  “I know.”

  “You got scared and you ditched her. Like an asshole.”

  My fingers twisted around each other. “I know.”

  “Do you not get that she never lets anyone in? What about this are you missing?”

  “I’m sorry! I told her I was sorry.”

  “Oh, well, jeez. In that case.”

  I sighed. “Can you not do sarcasm at me right now? Please? I know I fucked up. I’ll fix it.”

  “Is that what you think?” He shook his head. “You don’t know Mildred at all. She’s not gonna let you fix it.”

  “But—” I stared at him, trying to understand. Of course I could fix it. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, there is no ‘fixing’ this. You get one fucking chance with her. You blow it, you’re done.” He shook his head again and stretched backward, grimacing. “She and I are a lot alike. We’re not good with forgiveness and second chances. Why give someone the opportunity to hurt you twice? When Brian came back, he all but begged on his knees for her to at least try to be friends again and she shut him down.”

  “What I did was nowhere near as bad as what he did. I had a momentary crisis of faith, all right?”

  “She let you in and you hurt her. You think she’s gonna be seeing a lot of gradations there? Anyway, good luck. When you weren’t being a dick, you were good for her. Damn it. I fucking told you not to hurt her.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Hello! Mildred? Emerson?”

  We uttered a chorus of “Oh my god.”

  “Out here, Aunt Florence!” Emerson called, pushing himself into a more upright seated position as quickly as he could manage.

  “Well, hello. Nice to see you, Zane.”

  I stood to shake hands, but she held mine instead of shaking it. “Nice to see you too.”

  “Hmm.” Aunt Florence’s attention was specific and lancing; I wanted to shy away from her by merit of how closely she looked at me, and how exposed it made me feel.

  “I’ve already read her the riot act,” Emerson said. “You don’t have to beat her up or anything.”

  She turned a look on him. “Excuse me, I do not beat people up.”

  “You kind of do. Just, without touching them.”

  “Thank you for your input, Emerson. I took the liberty of buying groceries, if you’d like to see.”

  He shifted his legs to a higher step and pulled himself up. “What’d you bring me?”

  “Rutabagas.”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Time to learn.” Florence finally dropped my hand. “Are you staying for dinner?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “She wasn’t invited, and Mildred’s
not home with James yet.”

  “Hmm,” Aunt Florence said again. “Stay for dinner, Zane. Have you had rutabagas?”

  “Is that the same thing as a turnip? I’ve had turnips.”

  I followed them into the house, feeling like an imposter. Bracing against Dred’s arrival and discovery of me in her kitchen.

  I didn’t have to brace. She acted like nothing was amiss at all. Emerson must have texted her that I was here or something, or else how could she act like it didn’t even matter?

  He’d been right. She was completely shut down to me. I didn’t get the side-eye jokes, or the pokes, and she didn’t drop James in my lap or hand me a toy to distract him so she could do something else.

  She treated me like a stranger. Someone she barely knew. She treated me with politeness.

  It was the most alarming thing I’d ever seen her do.

  I was about to take off after dinner when Aunt Florence directed Emerson to wipe the table.

  “We wouldn’t want anything to soil Mildred’s quilt.” She reached for James. “Let’s see it, girl.”

  “Auntie—”

  “You will not get me into that dark, haunted little room. Bring it out here in the light.”

  Dred sighed. “The sitting room isn’t haunted.”

  “Sewing room,” Emerson corrected. “And all of us won’t fit in it. I want to see your quilt, too.”

  “It’s not a quilt. It’s a block.”

  My ears pricked up. “You finished a block? And you’re not ripping it out?”

  “It’s one damn block. It’s— No, I’m not ripping it out.”

  Aunt Florence snapped at her. “Quickly, please. Some of us are getting old standing here.”

  “You’re making this a bigger deal than it is.”

  “I merely asked to see your quilt. You are the reason we’re discussing it.”

  “Fine. But it’s not that big a thing.”

  I sat back down on the bench seat, and was slightly shocked when Aunt Florence pushed James’s booster seat next to me and plugged him into it.

  “Here, idle hands. Play with this.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a huge ring of keys, which James treated as if they were the greatest toys of all time.

  Emerson sat on the other side of the booster, but Aunt Florence remained standing.

  “It’s one block,” Dred mumbled, smoothing it out on the table.

  “Holy shit.” Emerson covered his mouth. “Sorry.”

  He was right. It was a “holy shit” kind of block. I didn’t reach for it, but I could see it wasn’t a normal block. It had layers. “Is that quilt as you go?”

  “Yeah. I figured I wouldn’t rip it out as much if I did it this way. And it’s a lot easier to store finished blocks and piece them together later, instead of piecing together the entire quilt top, and batting, and backing.” She fell back a half step when Aunt Florence moved closer to examine the block.

  Her long, grayish fingers traced the strips of fabric Dred had laid out almost like a sunburst; from one corner each strip got wider toward the other end, giving an impression of movement. It was bordered in black, highlighting the brightness of the colors somehow, even though it seemed like that should have made them look dark.

  “I got the idea from you, Z. When we were looking at your rainbow.”

  I felt honored that something I’d done had inspired her.

  “These are personal scraps.” Aunt Florence ran her fingers out to the edge of the sunburst.

  Dred came closer again. “I always wanted to make a quilt like your crazy quilt. This is my pathetic attempt. Anyway, it’s not that big a deal.”

  “This rose print is from a dress you had when you were a little girl. I don’t recognize the orange, but isn’t that yellow from one of your mother’s prized tea towels?”

  “Yeah.” Dred smirked. “I stole it when I was fifteen. I thought it would kill her to not have a matched set.”

  “Oh, no doubt it did, rotten child. This blue looks distinctly like something Obadiah would buy.”

  “From the first tie he ever made.”

  Emerson leaned in. “The one he made for the boyfriend who didn’t wear it?”

  “That guy was a fucking tool.”

  “Mildred.”

  “He was, Auntie. You would have thought so, too.”

  James said something, loudly, that sounded like agreement.

  “Exactly,” Dred replied.

  “Obie told me”—Emerson brushed his fingertips across the blue stripe—“that he made you the same tie and you wore it all the time.”

  She grinned. “It was magic, him making ties. And I was dating Jaq at the time, so I thought she’d, you know, think I was extra cool if I wore them.”

  Jaq loved a sexy woman in a tie. I smiled. “I bet she did.”

  “She definitely didn’t have any complaints.”

  Aunt Florence cleared her throat. “And the green?”

  Dred glanced at me. “Actually, that’s pretty new. But I gave Zane a piece of it for her quilt and realized how much I liked it.”

  I swallowed. Our quilts would be bound by that green now, and probably no one would notice it, but I’d know. And she would.

  “I can see its appeal,” Florence said mildly. “And this purple?”

  “I know that one.” Emerson sat back. “That’s from Obie’s old curtains, isn’t it? The weave or whatever looks the same. Though I thought they were black.”

  “They’d gone purple where the sun bleached them.” Dred’s hands smoothed down the block. “This is wrong side up, technically. Does it look off, Auntie?”

  “Mmm. No. I don’t think so.” Florence shifted the entire block directly under the light. “No, and you found a very even piece of it.”

  Dred rolled her eyes. “That was my third try. If anyone wants a bunch of curtain scraps, I have them.”

  I almost said I did, but I was making a quilt with squares, not strips. Not sunbursts. Not anything as beautiful as this block, with all different colors and patterns that still somehow went together.

  “What size will it be finished?” Aunt Florence asked, drawing it closer to herself to study the seams.

  “Eighty-six by ninety-three, I think.”

  Florence nodded. “For a queen bed.”

  “Yeah. I think it might be time to retire my old quilt, Auntie.”

  “Long past time.” Florence smiled at Emerson and me. “I made that for Mildred when she was just out of her crib. For years her mother called me every time she had to make the bed to tell me that doubling up the quilt on a child’s bed was ‘cruel and unusual.’”

  “Mom loves drama.”

  “That reminds me. I brought you something, before I knew you’d stolen your mother’s tea towel.” Again, Aunt Florence reached into her deep bag. “Do you remember this?”

  “Oh,” Dred whispered, taking the . . . pillowcase? “Auntie, she’ll kill you when she finds this gone.”

  “I found it at the very bottom of the linen cabinet. I’m certain she no longer uses it.”

  Dred spread it out, running dark fingers over white cotton, pressing it flat. “How long has it been in your purse?”

  “Only a few hours. You see what I mean?”

  “It’s not ironed.”

  “Wait.” I looked at Emerson, then back at Dred. “Your mom irons her pillowcases?”

  “With lavender water. She says it helps her sleep. Auntie, I can’t use this.”

  “My dear girl, you must use it. Unless you have your blocks planned out.”

  “No. No, but—but this— I can’t cut this up.”

  “Better it be used and loved rather than at the bottom of the linen cabinet.” Florence dragged her knuckles along the lace overlay at the opening of the pillowcase. “Her first grown-up sheets, before she and your father got married. ‘Egyptian cotton, Flo,’ she said to me. I thought it was all so hedonistic.” She smiled. “Can you imagine how naïve I was? I was offended by how much sh
e enjoyed her sheets. It’s gone a bit yellow in places, Mildred. You’ll want to find its true shade before you start working with it.”

  “I’m not sure— I don’t know what I’d do with it.”

  Except watching the way she smoothed out the fabric, tugged at it to find its shape, made me think she knew exactly what to do with it.

  “You’ll work it out, I’m sure. Time for me to leave. James, I’ll need my keys.” Florence held her hand out, and James giggled. “Please, young man.”

  He giggled again and surrendered the keys, then immediately started playing with my sleeve.

  “Damn.” Emerson poked James’s arm. “Seriously? You never give me anything I ask for. I say ‘please.’”

  “Yeah but you don’t have Aunt Florence’s tone.” Dred carefully folded her panel in half, loosely, and placed the pillowcase on top of it.

  Aunt Florence held up a hand. “Have a good night, you four. Think about what I said, Mildred.”

  “I’m not having dinner with them.”

  Aunt Florence gave Dred the same look she’d given James. “Just think about what I said.”

  “Fine, Auntie. I’ll think about what you said.”

  “That’s all I can ask.” Florence swept out, and Dred sank into a chair.

  Emerson went into the pantry for James’s biscuits. “You gonna tell us what that was all about?”

  “She wants me to reconcile with my parents. I told her it was under no circumstances gonna happen, but she hears ‘no’ and thinks it means ‘please convince me.’”

  “Huh. Here, James. Eat biscuits, not Zane’s clothes. So Florence is trying to reconcile you against your will with your folks? That’s hugely invasive.” He shrugged his shoulders as if he was shrugging off the idea because it made him uncomfortable. “I wouldn’t be able to deal with that.”

  “Apparently my mother’s been ‘thinking’ about our estrangement and it ‘weighs’ on her.” Dred snapped her fingers. “Not enough to call or come over or do anything at all that might change things. Apparently it’s a vague weight on her shoulders and that’s somehow my fault to fix.”

  I traded a glance with Emerson. “What about your dad?”