Once in a Blue Moon

by Vicki Covington

  Aunt Nell greeted them in the parking area at the back of the house, fly swatter in hand. She wore a sack dress and an apron with cross-stitching. Her gray hair was gathered into a bun, but a few ringlets framed her face.

  “Come on in,” she said, and hugged them one by one.

  The kitchen was all white—white pantry, white cupboards, white cabinets, even white dishes. A big white table was full of freshly picked vegetables—tomatoes, yellow crookneck squash, okra, string beans, and honeydew melons.

  “Excuse the mess,” she said.

  Mama started to wander. It seemed to Abi that, like her, Mama wasn’t exactly sure what to do or where to plant herself.

  Nell herded Abi and her parents toward a big gathering room with a pine floor, where a swarm of adults Abi didn’t know or at least didn’t recognize descended on them. Most were already drunk, she could tell that much. On the dining-room table was a huge platter of barbecue and fixings and a mess of empty beer cans.

  “Let me get some more buns,” Nell said, and went back to the kitchen.

  Nell’s husband, Uncle Mabry, pulled Abi aside and asked if she liked barbecue sandwiches.

  “Yes,” she told him shyly.

  He lifted up her chin a bit. “You look like kin,” he said tenderly.

  Abi didn’t know what to say.

  “I just mean you’re a sweet-looking, pretty girl.”

  He smiled at her, and she felt comfortable. He was a nice man.

  Within an hour or so, Mama and Daddy were drunk like the rest of the relatives. Aunt Nell stood on the hearth of the fireplace and made an announcement: “Marcia is coming and bringing her boyfriend. I’m afraid she’s been bitten by the love bug.”

  The love bug.

  Abi froze. She had no idea what this meant, but it sounded bad. She set the white plate with her half-eaten barbecue sandwich on the table and clutched her bottle of ginger ale with both hands. She thought of mosquito bites, fire ants, wasps, hornets, spiders, red bugs, scorpions.

  In the midst of Abi’s fretting, Aunt Nell took her aside and said, “Let me show you where you’ll sleep.”

  They went to the back porch to retrieve Abi’s luggage. Abi grabbed the pink suitcase that Mama had bought special for the trip. Aunt Nell guided her upstairs to a line of closed doors and opened one of them.

  “This is Marcia’s old room,” Aunt Nell said. “You’ll be sharing a bed with her tonight, honey.”

  Abi sat on the bed, newly fearful of love bug germs getting on her. The bed wasn’t particularly big, and she didn’t even know Marcia. But she didn’t want to seem rude, so she nodded and gave her aunt a smile.

  Aunt Nell, as if sensing something in her, took Abi’s hand in hers and said, “You’re such a quiet girl. What a relief from all the ruffians downstairs. Marcia’s a sweet girl like you, just older. She’s in college.”

  Abi looked around the room at the dresser, cedar chest, and quilt stand. Everything felt old in a way that was comforting. Aunt Nell raised one of the small windows, allowing a slight breeze to kiss the eyelet curtains, and told Abi she could stay upstairs or come back down with her.

  “I’ll unpack,” Abi told her.

  Aunt Nell smiled and closed the door.

  Abi heard Mabry’s voice in the hallway, though she couldn’t make out what he said. She heard Aunt Nell say to him, “I told you they were more than trailer trash.”

  It was the first time she had heard the term, but it was easy to understand the meaning. The words made a mark. Even after she grew up, moved to Birmingham, and made a life for herself, they were etched in her memory.

  She went over to the window. The branches of an oak tree were so close they looked as if, given time, they might grow right into Marcia’s bedroom. The cicadas buzzed away, more loudly than they did back home. Love bugs, Abi thought.

  Marcia’s vanity had three mirrors on hinges that gave Abi a fine look at herself. She sat on the small white bench in front of the mirrors and picked up an ivory brush with an M painted on it, then placed it gently back on the coverlet. In the drawer was a bottle of perfume. The fragrance was called Ambush. She took a whiff of it and pictured Marcia dabbing it behind her ears and on her wrists. She reached for a compact and, using the puff tucked inside, lightly applied powder to her cheeks. Then she opened some lipstick. It smelled like peaches. The outer tube read, “Taste me.” She put some on.

  She heard a commotion downstairs and knew it must be Marcia. She wiped the lipstick off with the back of her hand, opened the bedroom door, and ran to the landing of the stairs. She saw her cousin in turquoise shorts and a crisp white blouse. Her curly chestnut hair, much like Abi’s, was pulled back into a ponytail. Beside her was a suitcase with “AUBURN” written across it. A man stood next to her.

  “This is Johnny,” Marcia said.

  Abi sat and watched the two of them through the posts of the staircase handrail. Johnny was shaking hands with the men. He was tall and handsome, holding a pair of sunglasses. Marcia was hugging the women. Everybody was abuzz with offerings of beer and barbecue, and soon the crowd moved out of sight. Abi got up and went back into the bedroom, put on her pajamas, and slipped into bed. She pulled the sheet up to her chin. It was way too hot for quilts. When she rolled over to face the window, she saw the moon and stars through the branches of the oak.

  Sometime during the night, Marcia must have crawled into bed because when dawn broke, she was there, warm next to Abi. She wore a white nightgown, and her hair was spread across the pillow.

  Abi slipped quietly out of bed, put on her clothes, and went downstairs. She ate scrambled eggs and Virginia ham with gravy for breakfast. Aunt Nell and Mama had sliced a honeydew melon.

  When Marcia emerged, she looked much different from the way she had the day before. She was wearing tight jeans and an orange T-shirt. Her curly hair was wild. To this day, Abi took to women who looked like they’d forgotten to fix their hair or simply didn’t give a damn.

  Marcia kissed Aunt Nell on the cheek and took a piece of honeydew melon. She got the orange juice from the icebox and drank a big swig straight from the bottle.

  “Did Johnny go out to the fields?” she asked.

  “He did indeed,” Aunt Nell replied.

  “Well,” she said, and sat next to Abi. “Hello officially, Abi. Thanks for letting me share your bed. How about I take you to my favorite place on the farm?”

  Abi smiled at her and whispered, “Thanks.”

  “If you’re taking her to the pond, watch out for water moccasins,” Aunt Nell said.

  “She worries a lot,” Marcia told Abi.

  “I most certainly do,” Aunt Nell agreed.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Marcia said to her.

  “Be sure and wear your Keds,” Aunt Nell went on.

  Marcia held a leg up to show Aunt Nell she already had them on.

  Soon, they were walking along a path that led away from the fields.

  Marcia explained to Abi that it was harvest time for tobacco farmers. “When we were little, we had to pick hornworms from the plants all summer,” she said.

  Abi didn’t ask what they were or what they looked like. She wanted to steer all conversation away from bugs.

  “What do you like to do?” Marcia asked her.

  “I like to read,” Abi replied.

  “Oh, so what do you like to read?”

  “Biographies,” she told her.

  “What are you reading now?”

  “The biography of Katharine Lee Bates. She wrote ‘America the Beautiful.’”

  Marcia reached up and gathered her curls. “It’s hot already,” she said. Then she began to sing, “‘O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain . . .’”

  Marcia stopped, put her hands on Abi’s shoulders, and turned her back to face the fields. “Around here, it’s brown waves of tobacco,” she said with a laugh.

  They kept walking. The land rose and fell. At the crest of a particularly steep hill, Marc
ia pointed. “There it is.”

  It was a pond, but it didn’t look like the muddy little one Abi knew from home. It was large and clear, more like a lake. The sunlight turned it a pleasing green. There was an island in the middle of the water where a weeping willow grew, its long and tender branches crying downward, brushing against the dark, wet earth. Abi understood why Marcia wanted her to see it.

  They maneuvered through tangled vines and headed down to the water.

  “Keep an eye out,” Marcia told her. “If a pond is fringed by wetland, it provides a friendly habitat for frogs, turtles, and muskrats. The water looks green, and this means that algae is growing. It’s a food source for the minnows, so you’ll see lots of them. You see that canoe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever been in one?”

  “No.”

  Marcia helped Abi into the rusty aluminum canoe, then pushed it off the bank and jumped in. The little vessel lurched and rocked as it skidded into the pond. Soon, the ride calmed. The rhythmic movement of Marcia’s paddling was smooth. Abi was a cautious kid, one prone to being skittish about adventures. But this was heaven.

  “Like it?” Marcia asked.

  “Oh, yes.”

  Marcia stopped paddling, and Abi turned around to face her.

  “We’ll stop here a minute,” Marcia said.

  A few stones were in the bottom of the canoe, and Marcia threw one in the water. A flurry of movement rose up around it.

  “Look at all those dragonflies.”

  “Do they bite?” Abi asked her.

  “No, they’re here for our pleasure. Would you say they’re emerald or blue or what?”

  “I think they’re blue-green.”

  “Like those pretty eyes of yours.”

  “Yours are pretty, too,” Abi replied.

  “Do you know you look exactly like I did at your age? We were talking about it last night. Can you see the resemblance?”

  Abi blushed, hoping she’d look just like Marcia when she was older. “I wish I had sisters,” Abi told her.

  “I’ll be your big sister. We can write letters to each other.”

  Marcia took off her shoes and wiggled her toes, and Abi followed suit. Abi felt that she and Marcia were right in the middle of something—not just the pond but something else. Time encompassed her. It was her friend. No need to look back or worry forward. And being surrounded by this assurance, she knew it was safe to ask the big question.

  She hesitated. Then the words came forth of their own accord. “What’s a love bug?”

  Marcia threw her head back and laughed, causing the clasp to drop from her hair and into the water. She ducked a hand in after it but came up empty.

  “Where did you hear about that?”

  “Aunt Nell said one bit you.”

  “Oh, she’s always in my business. Who did she tell this to?”

  “All of us,” Abi replied.

  Marcia kept laughing. “I’m glad Johnny didn’t hear that.”

  “He’s your boyfriend,” Abi said, as if to affirm.

  “Yes, he’s my boyfriend.”

  “Did he bite you?”

  Marcia smiled at Abi. “That’s just an old saying for when somebody has fallen in love.”

  “Why do people say fall in love, though?” Abi asked her.

  “That’s a good question. I truly don’t know.”

  “Because it hurts? Like a bite?” Abi pressed on.

  Marcia tried something new. “Know how it feels when you’re playing on a swing set and you pump a few times with your legs until the swing is high, then you get butterflies in your stomach right when you start coming down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, that’s falling, and it’s a bit dangerous, but you love the way it feels, falling through the air. Because you understand that if you hold on tight, if you trust your hands, then you’re home free, it’s just you and the swing.” She paused, then went on. “Sometimes, people fall in love the minute they meet somebody. It happens so quickly, like a bug bite.”

  Marcia looked wistfully into the water. Abi hoped she didn’t mind telling her these kinds of things, teaching her a new language.

  Marcia offered one last thought. “When somebody’s in love, you can sometimes see it in their eyes. When they’re looking at the person they love.”

  Abi kept her eyes downcast so Marcia wouldn’t see them, because if she did she might see that, during their time on the pond, Abi had been bitten herself. She had fallen in love with Marcia.

  Marcia picked up another stone and cast it sidelong into the water. The stone made ripples that caught the sunlight.

  There would be many men—and women, too—whom Abi would love during the years ahead. But no matter who she was with, she always felt she was looking for the language of love that Marcia had taught her on the pond that day, years before.

  LANDON

  Landon leashed Alejandro and made sure to lock the door behind her. She was still a bit on edge from the break-in. She could walk down the street to where Cullom’s renters gave way to homeowners. Or she could walk up the street, which would lead her past generic apartments, Vulcan Park, and ultimately to the top of Red Mountain. She looked up the street. She had been warned that Cullom got grittier the farther up you went. So she chose to walk down, even if it meant seeing the homeowners’ places with their single mailboxes and well-tended gardens. They reminded her of what she had lost.

  It was a perfect November day. The air was crisp. The sky was blue. The trees—oaks, maples, hickories—were big and old. Back in her suburb in Homewood, the trees hadn’t been spared from construction.

  Toward the bottom of the street, she noticed a house with a For Sale sign. It was a fixer-upper, to say the least. The weeds were growing wild and high. A fence was in need of repair. Alejandro sniffed around, interested in something. Landon hoped he was picking up a scent from a stray cat, rather than a squatter. You never knew what might be lurking in Southside. And yet, unexpectedly emboldened by the morning’s adrenaline rush, she picked up Alejandro and headed for the porch. She peered inside cloudy windows. Then she tried the door, which wasn’t locked. The curious scavenger inside her reared its head, excited by the possibility of discovery—maybe plates and cups, a ladder, Ball jars for canning, a microwave if she was lucky, a weed whacker that actually worked.

  But when she walked in, she saw only a small fan and a box of nails. She put Alejandro down and unleashed him. He scurried down the hall to what turned out to be the kitchen—free of appliances—then around a corner into the living room. Landon followed him, and they came to a stop in front of a narrow staircase. He hesitated, so she gathered him up and made her way upstairs. In a closet in one of the bedrooms that yawned open from the landing, Landon finally found some treasure. She crept into the low-ceilinged walk-in and took note of papers that were strewn about, bundles of knotted Christmas lights. It wasn’t exactly the find she had hoped for, but she couldn’t resist. She discovered a box of garbage bags with a few bags still inside and stuffed the lights and the papers into one of them. She was particularly interested in what appeared to be letters—envelopes with handwritten addresses.

  “Nobody but me would be doing this,” she told Alejandro. “But I guess you’re used to it.”

  Once they were back on the porch, she placed the bag by the door, leashed Alejandro, and continued down the street, hoping no one had noticed her trespass. The well-appointed windows of the neighboring houses stared back, unconcerned. At the bottom of the hill, she turned left. The houses began to change. Some had two entrances; others had lawns full of beat-up cars. Alejandro relieved himself in a patch of grass. It was then that she noticed pecans on the sidewalk. She looked up and saw the tree they had fallen from. Now, this was truly a treasure. Not today, but maybe tomorrow, she would wear her empty backpack and, assuming the residents weren’t home, collect as many as it could hold. She had a nutcracker, one that had been her mother’s, and could make hers
elf a little feast.

  She shouldn’t feel guilty, she decided. After all, her women ancestors were gatherers who walked the ridges of mountains, collecting nuts and berries to keep their families alive. And if the people who lived here hadn’t picked up the pecans, they apparently didn’t want them.

  She walked on, turned back westward and out of the rental district. The homeowners’ lawns were immaculate. Though it was November, the crepe myrtles were still in bloom. The fall annuals—pansies, periwinkle, and impatiens—were thriving, making every yard bright and colorful. But damn it if the homeowners hadn’t all done the one thing she hated regarding gardening: they had trimmed the goldenrod, the nandina bushes, all the shrubs, with electric hedge cutters, shaping them into perfect squares or orbs. Nothing here was allowed to grow out of line, wild and graceful.

  When Landon returned home, she remembered the bag of lights and letters she had left on the porch of the abandoned house. She let Alejandro into their apartment, filled his food bowl, then headed out to fetch her haul.

  Back with her booty, she discovered that most of the envelopes contained merely bills, receipts, grocery lists, et cetera. Yet there was the occasional letter, handwritten on pink old-fashioned stationery. They all began the same way: “Don’t toss this before you read it.” The writer’s name was Chelsea. The recipient was Brody. In the letters, she apologized profusely to Brody, explaining that she had changed, that she wanted to start over, that she wanted to have children: “I’m not the same girl as before” and “Please see me like the person I was when we first met” and “I’m begging you . . .”

  Landon threw the letters away; she identified too much.

  She walked to the window and drew the sheer curtains to one side. She felt the bad thing coming over her, the sadness of divorce. She wasn’t Chelsea, though. Robbie had given her more than enough time to get help, and she hadn’t. What finally compelled her to admit herself to the hospital was an intervention from her colleagues. They had noticed her ups and downs, as they called them delicately. Since they were all psychologists, they knew the language of her behavior. They reminded her that she was spinning like a top at times, frantically overbooking her patients. They noticed she was hungover many days and suggested she might be self-medicating.