By Jen Brewington
Featured Art: “The Thing About Umbrellas” by Lesley Weston

Merriam started this. She called me a whore on a Sunday morning in the middle of the small grocery store in my hometown. To be fair, she had some facts on her side. Her husband, Neal, and I had this on and off thing for years. What I mean is, we were married once. He was my husband before he was her husband. It’d been ten years since we ended things, still young and dumb, and I hardly even thought about him except when I did. Still, he was mine first.

Well, there is more to the story or at least the memory of it. A few months ago, I found out quite suddenly that I’d lost my job as a graphic designer at a small press in Ohio. It was a budget cut thing, and I couldn’t do much about it in these technological times. I loved my job, and my boss loved me. She was sorry to let me go. At the same time, I was seeing this guy, Sam, who had recently confessed his deep love for The Grateful Dead. I guess that could have been overlooked, except when we had sex, he asked me over and over, “Are you okay?” and the more he asked the less okay I was. And the third unbearable straw was that my cat died. My vet said, “You gave her a good life.” It didn’t mean anything to anyone else, the loneliness of losing her, but it must be said that she was the best cat. Talkative, gentle but wild, and she had the loudest purr. I called my mom, tangled in the dead roots of it all.

“What’s wrong, Honey?”

Hearing her voice sent me sobbing. “Bubbles died,” I said. I could hardly get it out.

“Oh, Honey. I’m so sorry. She was a good cat,” she said. She already knew about the job.

“I don’t know what to do. Nobody’s hiring graphic designers in Ohio. I can’t afford my apartment. How did it get like this?”

“It’s been a stressful time. Why don’t you come home? Figure out a plan. You can help me with your father.”

My dad had some heart issues, and he was still recovering from a surgery a few months earlier. My mom was struggling to keep things running, mostly physically, and I was out of a job, so the timing of it all worked out for us. And that was it. I moved back home to Mississippi away from Ohio, away from a lifeI’d made, such as it was, and back to the one I was born into. It was a temporary step through a portal to shake things up, to come up with a plan. Sam made a gesture of objection, but in the end, I think he knew I’d never go with him to an outdoor music festival, and he’d never go with me to the ballet, and we were both cut from a miscast play. I liked my parents. We got along well. I mention that here because one might be searching for a disturbed home life, a difficult relationship, a violent moment that could explain my behavior. There was only ordinary loss. I posted a tribute for Bubbles online with photos and Neal liked the post. That was it. Our tale of whoredom began.

                         *

My parents’ house was my house for eighteen years, and it was the same as before in that they’d never updated the wallpaper, but it was different in that they had a whole new set of kitchenware and a new couch and TV. My dad had a dog now, a little terrier named Sweetpea. He was busy training Sweetpea how to sit, twirl, lay down, and speak. Sweetpea was a six-year-old stray, and he came knowing how to do all the dog basics, but the training gave my dad something to do. My mom stayed busy cleaning houses, including her own. She hummed and organized and passed out hugs for free. It was nice to be around so much love again.

My first weekend home, I worked outside to help my dad with the garden in the front of the house. “Fill up the buckets, so the water can settle overnight,” he said. “We’ll use it in the morning.” The smell of fresh water coming out of the hose felt warm and smelled liked summer. I filled the buckets and set them aside under the carport. The garden had new dirt and plants. The same hydrangeas I grew up around were bushier and blooming a deep dark purple. My dad told me the dirt is what determines the color of the flower.

Neal called out of nowhere later that day. I hadn’t told him I moved home, but I posted a picture of my dad and me in the garden with the caption “Back to my roots.” I looked happy and mysterious. My dad looked annoyed. It took a lot of takes. I was sure Neal had seen it. I was hoping, if I’m honest, which is what I’m trying to be here, honest. When I answered, he said, “I was thinking about your laugh today. I fell in love with your laugh before I fell in love with you. It’s been too long since I heard it.”

“I’m not going to laugh for you, Neal,” I said.

“Give me a chance to think of something funny.”

“Go to bed,” I said. But really, I wanted him to keep thinking of something.

“Do you remember that time we tried to jump the trains with Lauren and Bobby, but we both chickened out and smoked a blunt in the back of Bobby’s van instead? I’ve never laughed so much.”

I remembered. Lucy + Neal scratched into the side of an old train car with a key. “Go to bed, Neal.” That old dank love coming out to play.

                        *

So, I was young and fell in love with the boy down the street? Who among the living does not desire love? There wasn’t anything particularly special about Neal. There wasn’t anything particularly special about me. We were kids who lived in a small neighborhood near the woods with strong imaginations and a solid home life. Our childhood was a sanctuary of invitations. It didn’t seem possible for a yes to spoil, and so we said yes to everything.

Neal rode past my house one day on his bike at the start of summer our sophomore year. I was laying out in the front yard reading a whodunit book. I always enjoyed a mystery. My father had been building one of his cars in the backyard, and my mom was inside cleaning out the refrigerator while watching soaps on a tiny TV She’d always wanted a TV in the kitchen, and one of her clients gave her one when she cleaned up a house after they moved.

That day is clearer to me than yesterday. Neal stopped his bike by the curb and asked me for some hose water. He was tall and tan and beautiful. I walked over to the hose and turned on the faucet. The water came out warm at first, so he let it run for a minute on the yard. “Good for the grass.” He took the hose and drank and handed it back. He said, “Thanks, Lucy.” And that was it. I was gone. I was his and he was mine. Finders keepers.

One memory takes up more than its share of time. The summer before our senior year, I got pregnant. When I think back on it now, I must have been in a bit of a shock. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Neal, for weeks. I tried to forget about it. I didn’t even let myself take it in. It was the early aughts. Things were different. Things were the same. Things were off that whole year. This one star was over here in this moon’s house. Planets weren’t where they were supposed to be in my birth chart. There was a continental shift in the earth’s surface forming new lands. I normally spent summers with my grandparents, but they’d wanted to go to Alaska on a cruise that year, so there I was, home alone while my parents were at work. It happened. It happens.

I finally did tell Neal a few weeks in, and we were in the midst of our first big decision. We talked about breaking up. We talked about ending the pregnancy. We talked about adoption. We screamed. We cried. We hugged. We loved. We hated. We fought. We went round and round. He’s the one who suggested marriage. It seemed, at the time, the thing to do. We told our parents. His parents, recently divorced, were furious. Mine were sad. Our dads took us to City Hall the next week. Our moms didn’t go, but mine lent me her heels and took me to get a dress from the mall. About a month after we got married, I had a miscarriage. It was the first of several. I discovered after the third one that I had a heart-shaped womb, inhospitable. It would be difficult but not impossible to carry a child full-term. I was elated. I was devastated. I felt both things at once and ever since. Relief buried under grief.

Neal and I became closer for a time, and we had a decent marriage for another few years. We doubled down in a way. Tried again. And again. He got a job working construction. I took some classes at the local community college
and worked part-time at a bank. We got a cat and an apartment. We were committed to the bit.

                        *

This small town had surprising pockets of culture and art, but it also had the empty buildings downtown, a growing population of unhoused, and, of course, my entire childhood, so it was a mixed bag wandering around what was familiar and what was strange. My parents lived off the main street that kept going for miles and turned into a highway and everything to do or buy was on either side of that street. There were restaurants, a laundry mat, a car wash, a grocery store, a hospital on one side and a university on the other, a bank, and all the fast food a kid could want. I grew attached to this one live oak tree in my neighborhood whose roots interrupted the sidewalk, and so I checked in on it as I walked. Still there. I listened to the mockingbirds and stared at the random weirdos walking the streets, of which I was one due to the staring. I wondered about the people who lived inside the houses. I used to know most of the families, went to school with the kids, played in the woods nearby in the evenings.

I’d been skipping around my parents for about a month, when I decided to buy some cigarettes. It seemed like a dumb thing to do, and I wanted to do something dumb. I really wanted some pot, but it’d been so long, and I wasn’t sure of the where or who or what of it all. I was still in my bird pajamas with a tank top and a sports bra that smooshed my large breasts into one enormous boobshelf. I was wearing flip flops with no pedicure. It was a look.

The gas station down the street was a quick walk and the weather was nice, a little windy but sunny. The barking neighborhood dogs seemed surprised when I barked back. The older woman down the street on her front porch, always on her porch, watched me but did not smile or wave back when I smiled and waved at her. Some kids around ten were riding their bikes and one of them pretended to shoot me forming his hand into a pistol.

“What’d I ever do to you?” I asked, but it was too late. His thumb pressed, and bang, bang. Woman down.

Inside the store, the tall, round man with gray and black locks down to his waist bowed his head when I entered. He did that to everyone. It was very classy. This was a new, nice gas station, and everything was still clean. I’d been in there every day this week, and every day he said, “Be good,” and then he handed me my printed receipt like a signal that he, too, remembered a time of peace, love, and understanding.

I went to the counter and asked for cigarettes.

He asked, “What kind?”

“The good kind?”

“What. Kind?”

“Anything that isn’t menthol,” I said.

He shook his head and grabbed a pack. He rang them up.

I left the counter and went back for a six-pack of beer, leaving him on pause. He rang up the beer. I wanted candy, and I turned, but he said, “Pay” in a gently stern way, so I paid.

“You didn’t tell me to ‘be good,’” I said, standing there, blocking the day.

“You don’t seem keen,” he said.

I hadn’t noticed the line forming behind me, but a little boy said, “Is she going to hell, daddy?” Daddy said, “Shhhhhh.” I knew the answer was waiting at the kitchen table when they got home.

Then I noticed him. Standing there behind the boy.

Neal smirked with that smirk of his and looked me up and down and I said, “Of course, it’s you. Of course, you’re here.” I took my pack of cigarettes and the beer and flung my arms around wildly. The bottles clinked.

“You know her?” asked the cashier.

“Almost,” he said.

“Close call,” I said and left.

But wait. What did he mean by “Almost?” I paced outside the gas station until he came out. “What did you mean by almost?” He was still tall. Bastard. “Almost means not quite but very nearly,” he said.

I punched him in the arm and turned to leave, but then he got on his stupid bike without a helmet and rode away past me blending in with that same group of kids that fake-killed me with their hand pistols. “Stop leaving me!” I shouted.

But when he turned around and biked circles around me as I walked, I said, “Leave me alone.”

“It’s impossible to do both things,” he said.

I turned and jogged away toward home. The old woman on her porch with a bonnet on her head yelled, “You cain’t run in flip-flops! What are you thanking?” Damned if I knew.

Neal followed behind me, slow-pedaling. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

“I’m in my pajamas.”

“This weekend? We can meet up at that place nearby.”

“What’s the point?”

“Face the final battle?” He shrugged with his hands still on the handlebars.

“We never had an ending. You just left.”

“That’s not how I remember it,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not how it happened.”

I sighed loudly, dramatically, and kept walking. He turned his bike and headed back to wherever it was he came from. I had some guesses. When I got home, my father was sitting at the kitchen table, a solid oak dining room table they’d had since they married, from my grandfather’s carpentry hobby. I loved that table, heavy and built for time.

My mother shot me a look when I put the beer in the fridge, but she didn’t say anything about it. She asked, “What are we doing today, Dear?”

My dad thought she was talking to him. “I miss working. Not much else to do in the garden. Sweetpea can sit and stay with the best of them. I need a new project.”

My mom gestured toward me. “How about your daughter?”

He looked at me above his glasses. “Sit,” he said. “Stay.”

“Alright, alright. I have a plan. I bought a website, and I’m thinking about starting my own brand design business. Like, you know, my own boss kind of thing.” Neither parent seemed impressed with this plan, at least in terms of my pitch. “I thought I’d call Sally or Laurence. Really settle into this high school vibe,” I laughed at the thought. I hadn’t seen either of them since we were, what? Sixteen. I’d dropped out of school after I got pregnant and finished an online GED, but we were a dynamic trio up until then. I couldn’t believe, when I checked, that we weren’t even friends on social media now. I requested to add both right that moment and then went down a brief but deep spiral of scrolling on my phone. “Laurence lives in Mexico?” I asked.

“No phones in the kitchen,” my mom said. “Goes by Lo now. They’re a missionary. Married that Thompson boy. They have two kids. Maybe three.”

“A missionary?” I asked, hardly able to picture it. The “fucks” we flew around. The middle fingers we flipped. The joints we toked. Good for Lo. Kicking it for Christ. “What about Sals?”

“Sally had some tough times. She was in rehab in Arizona for a while, and then I’m not sure. I ran into her mother at the store a few months back, and she seemed very sad. She said, ‘I’ve lost her.’”

“Can’t lose a person. No one belongs to anyone in the end,” Dad said. Sweetpea tottered in and sat next to my dad at his feet where he stayed, beautifully. My dad reached in his pocket and pulled out a treat. “Speak,” he said. Sweetpea wagged his tail, barked, and happily took the treat.

“What about Neal’s new wife? Do you know anything about her?”

My mom sighed again. “She’s hardly his new wife. I don’t want to be your Gossip Goose. You’ll have to go out in the world and find things out on your own.”

It occurred to me in this exchange that not even my parents had followed me into the portal to the past. I was excavating it on my own. A short list of things going on in the world more important than my current state: 22 people frozen to death in the U.S. over the winter because they were too poor to heat their homes or didn’t have homes to heat. Politicians playing war games with their egos and calling it God. So many missing Indigenous women, and no one looking. Children of Gaza. Ukraine. Iran. Greenland, apparently. The selling of public land to billionaires. The invisible extinction of almost every animal. The overpopulation of one. Countries with loose borders on the verge of bankruptcy. Weather patterns shifting with violent intentions. I could go on. Sometimes at night, when I tried to fall asleep, I thought of this list, counting problems instead of sheep. It was all too much, and there was nothing I could do about any of it. So, instead, I got lost in memories and let them haunt me like a ghost only I could see, hear, know was real.

                       *

I met Neal at the bar nearby the following Saturday. It was a sports bar packed full of undergrads. Boys all dressed in their best T-shirts and girls in their sparkling shirts and shiny lips. I walked in and moved between people looking for Neal, but the crowd made me nervous, so I went outside. The wooden patio was quieter with only a few tables being used. It was too dark to really make anyone out, which I liked. 

Neal walked up and said, “What you doing here?” mimicking the conversation style of the guys sitting at a table nearby. With their polo shirts and backwards baseball caps.

“Taxes,” I said. “Can I join you? I haven’t done taxes in years.”

He sat beside me and scooted his chair as close to mine as possible. It was a big table, and this made us look like a couple. That was the point. The server came by the table, and Neal ordered two tequilas and two beers.

“People can see you,” I said.

“I don’t care about people.” He held my hand, and that’s when I knew we weren’t really there. This was a fantasy. We were teenagers possessing our adult bodies at a bar for kids to hookup and watch games. “Why’d we get divorced?”

“Why’d we get married?”

He gave this some thought but did not respond. “Have a shot with your old pal.”

“I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

“You know me,” he said.

“I don’t. And you don’t know me.”

“I know you.” He put his nose to my nose.

“Almost.”

He scooted closer.

“Stop.” I pushed him gently away. I hoped he wouldn’t stop. I hoped he’d get closer. He didn’t.

“Two tequilas,” the waitress interrupted. “And two beers.” We said thank you, but I don’t think either of us looked away from one another. He took my hand in his, licked the space between my thumb and index finger, sprinkled salt on it, and handed me a lime. We did those shots and three more, a beer each time. I leaned over and kissed him. Were this to go to trial, the defense might suggest the drinking influenced behavior, but then the prosecution could make the same point. It was all in how willing the jury would be to understand that there is no real distinction between the past and the present.

I got out of my chair and climbed onto his lap, straddling him and showing those boys at the table beside us how it is you kiss a woman. He put his hands in my back jean pockets and pulled me even closer, eliminating time itself. We weren’t trying to be discreet. It didn’t occur to us. I was sure at any moment, the sky would open and rain down fire and destruction, the end of longing. No day after to consider. There would be no next.

He stood up and picked me up with him. I put my feet on the ground. “Let’s go to your place,” he said.

“It sounds so simple,” I said.

“It is so simple.”

“It’s a good pitch, don’t get me wrong.”

I imagined my parents sitting at the kitchen table, hearing us stumble in. I thought of repeating history. Giving it a redo. I thought of Merriam. Why did I think of Merriam? I said, “Call a ride and go home to your wife.”

“You were my wife,” he said.

“Past tense,” I said, and I walked away. I called for a driver from the parking lot and cried the whole way home. The drive was short and silent. I gave him five stars. We should have known someone would see us. Someone who knew
Merriam.

                          *

What game I was playing with Neal was a mystery to me. I had to snap out of it. Get in the here. Get in the now. A lot of it had to do with mindset, I found. Well, I found it in a book called How to Be Happy and Find Inner Peace that I picked up from the little library down the street. My dad wanted me to get a book on plants he’d seen the last time he went, but I couldn’t find it, so I got this instead. It called for a lot of breathing. A lot of meditation. Lists of gratitude. Mantras. A lot of not talking to Neal. A lot of not answering his calls. And yoga, of course, but who had time?

There’s nothing quite like an empty grocery store on a Sunday morning. Everything in its place, perfectly aligned and clean. I had the whole store to myself for fifteen glorious minutes. Cans moved to the front of shelves; boxes stacked like they’d just arrived. Choicest pick of zucchini, greens, and bell peppers. Time to smell the oranges and squeeze the avocados before selecting the best ones, before they’d been manhandled by strangers who sneezed in their hands. My mistake was loitering near the meat section and flirting with the butcher, Shawn. We went to high school together and knew one another in the way you know people from high school. Not at all. He went into the back and came out eager to show off his prize cut, a T-bone slab on a white plate. I wasn’t interested in Shawn, but I was lonely, so I giggled in response, ridiculous. He was muscular in a lazy kind of way and bearded with full and curly eyebrows. I leaned towards Shawn to look at the raw meat he held up. “Looks good,” I said. I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to look like. I didn’t eat red meat. I’d had too much time on my hands lately, thinking and planning and worrying, and it was either flirt with Shawn or get a gallon of chocolate ice cream and a box of wine. I noticed people coming in, surrounding me, and soon the whole place was full of people in suits and dresses and children, the after-church crowd. This town still had one. They gathered their rotisserie chickens and potatoes and salads and potato salads.

Merriam walked right up to me, her face unfamiliar but full of rage. I thought she was going to slap me. Her hand stayed on her belly, and I noticed a small bump. One shouldn’t be presumptuous with women’s belly bumps, but it was familiar to me, and that’s the moment I stopped breathing. Behind her stood Neal. It all came into focus. What was he playing at here? Merriam asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Groceries,” I said and looked down at my cart.

“No, I mean here.”

I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to respond. She looked beautiful angry.

“Lucy,” Neal said. “We . . . ”

“Don’t you dare talk to this whore,” Merriam said. “Whore!” she repeated, loudly, for the gathering town square. If she handed me a red letter, I’d have sewn it on myself. I looked at Shawn who had moved to the other side of the counter, watching along with a small crowd. “I thought you lived in Ohio.”

“I live here now,” I said, but it sounded like a question. “What do you want me to say?” I was red from embarrassment, and I noticed some teenagers holding up their phones recording the whole mess. “I lost my job. I moved home.”

“I don’t give a shit about your pitiful life,” she said but then paused and waited. She wanted to hear more about my pitiful life.

“I was good at it. It’s the only thing I’m good at. I don’t know what else to do,” I said, realizing the truth of it.

“Some days, I feel so hollow inside that it burns. It physically burns,” I said. “You’ve gotten fat,” she said.

“Would we call this fat?” I asked, looking down at my body. “Chubby maybe?”

“Just leave us alone,” she said.

I obeyed the command like I was under a spell. I walked past the filming teenagers, leaving my shopping cart behind. I didn’t buy any groceries.

                        *

The next day, I was hungover again, and my mom was mad at me, but she wouldn’t tell me she was mad at me, so she made me go with her to work. “You’re not gonna lay around all day eating chips,” she said.

“We have chips?” I asked, looking around the pantry. I didn’t see any chips.

No one loved to clean a corner like my mom. She enjoyed putting some order into other people’s lives. She had a real sense of calm after cleaning. The house we cleaned first was an older two-story built sometime in the 1950s. It was painted a dull yellow with bright green trim and had a lightpost out front with flowering bushes and a few trees, some maple and one oak. It was quite simple. “Are they here?” I asked, noticing a motorcycle parked but no cars.

“No, the parents work, and the kids are at school. Nice family,” she said. She walked around the side and dug around some empty pots and pulled out a key. She held it up and said, “Aha,” like we were adventurers in a video game who found the treasure on Level 1.

The inside of the home was pleasantly unsurprising. I’d been to houses with her before that looked nice and calm on the outside and were full of rooms of chaos and filth. This one was a postcard of the outside. Nice, lived-in, modest. The décor and furniture were mostly mid-mod. There were a few interesting paintings and photographs on the walls and two giant bookshelves in the living room. A pittie and a yellow lab came running up barking, but they stopped and wagged their tails and asked for pets when they saw Mom. She gave both head-pets, but then she said, “That’s a good boy” only to the pittie. I raised an eyebrow. “Only one of them’s a good boy,” she said. “The other one poops in the closet.” She went to the kids’ rooms, where I suspected the poop closet was, and I started in the kitchen.

I’d had a bleating headache all day, so I was drinking coffee out of a paper cup. It was already cold. I popped it in the microwave, which needed a good clean. When my mom heard the microwave, she yelled to use “lemon slices in water” to clean the microwave.

A photo of the family on the refrigerator caught my attention. The mom and father were on either side of their two kids, around twelve and fourteen, I guessed. They were all wearing numbers from a marathon or a run or something on their shirts. The parents were smiling big, but the kids looked bored.

It was a lovely picture.

My mom walked into the kitchen with a trash bag in her gloved hands. “You’ll need to do a deep cleaning of the fridge,” she said. “Use baking soda. They don’t like harsh chemicals.” I turned around with tears in my eyes, and her tone shifted. “What’s wrong, dear?”

“I thought this was going to be my life,” I said, gesturing around.

She made a tsk sound. “It’s easy to let the imagination go wild in an empty house.”

“You would have been an excellent grandmother,” I sighed, remembering where this all started, the truth of it.

“I’m content,” she shrugged. “Don’t feel sorry for yourself. That’s the devil’s brew.” She gave me a side hug. She went back to dusting and mopping floors, and I cleaned out the refrigerator. Though tempted, I did not lift any peanut butter chocolates kept cold in the butter dish shelf. I tried to be content.

Acknowledging the true start of this whole episode pulled my feet from the quicksand of nostalgia. I am the destroyer of my own fate, the beloved child made new. I am the possessed and obsessed, the lonely, the brave, the tired believer without faith, the joyful bearer of sadness, the raging citizen, lost in the swirl of collapsing galaxies. And yet in this moment, I was none of these things. I had to choose a way forward. Turn left. Turn right. The important part now was to do something.

When I checked my online situation, I had 35 notifications. Sam sent a DM asking if I was okay. I knew before I looked the public spectacle had made its way online. In some sort of small, local way, I was known. There were two videos from two angles, one featuring Merriam and one featuring me. There were a few edits, mostly comical. For a moment, I panicked, but it felt already behind me. The benefit of internet buzz in these trying times was that even bombing a country only kept attention for a week, tops. This was child’s play. Some teenagers experimenting with influence. If not literally, the memory of it would disappear under the numbers. Fifteen minutes whittled down to a few seconds. In the end, it was a small humiliation. I deleted my accounts and triggered a collapse of the time machine I’d been travelling in. 

I went into a closet in the backroom to put away some folded towels and found my mom’s old kitchen TV next to a DVD player. I took them into my room, dusted them off, plugged them up on my nightstand. I pressed play, a forward movement. The movie still inserted from whenever the DVD player had been stored started playing, and I recognized the hypnotic soundtrack immediately. It was In the Mood for Love. My mom’s favorite romance. I peeled an orange during a scene in the rain. Sweetpea cuddled on the foot of the bed. I wondered what he was like as a puppy. I wondered who he loved first, if he remembered his mom. It’s difficult to know one’s first real memory, but I held a clear image of being held by my mother in a rocking chair, still small enough to fit in her arms crossed along her chest. The room was dim with the lights out. It was dusk or maybe dawn. She hummed while rocking me, and I knew love.

---

Jen Brewington has previously been published in Southern Humanities Review and Saturday Evening Post.