The Cheerful Giver, part 2

For Alyson, Jodi, and Molly

It wasn’t an unforgivable sin to interrupt her mother’s weekly cribbage group, but it was. 

Aunt Helen answered the door, her tiny Bichon Frise, Fritz, by her side. Aunt Helen was one of the sweetest people to have ever walked the earth, which is why everyone forgave her the existence of Fritz, the most poorly behaved dog of all time. She frequently liked to remind people that Bichon’s had once been used by the French for acts of diplomacy–they would let the fluffy white dogs trot down the planks of the ships before them, because who could be antagonistic towards such cute, fluffy white dogs? Fritz was no diplomat. She was a yippy, corn-chip scented mess of tangled, white fur that was pink and gooey around the eyes. She nipped at children, pulled on her leash, was known to knock down the trashcan for extra scraps of food, and–as she got older–was having an increasing number of “accidents” inside the house. But Helen was devoted to the dog, so the smattering of dampened newspaper on her linoleum was forgiven by her closest friends. 

Helen, on the other hand, was an effortless hostess. She always kept the gin handy, had endless bowls of roasted rosemary cashews on-hand for nibbling. The cribbage group came to her house every other week. In her off weeks, hosting rotated between the other three women. In her widowhood she had bloomed a bit, no longer tied down by her two children or doting on her husband Big Earl, she fancied herself an artist, and had taken up making large abstract paintings in the garage. 

She was a stunning woman, but not in the traditional sense. She moved about the world like a crane, all legs and neck and flowing skirts and statement jewelry. Of course, she wasn’t actually Gail’s Aunt, not in the slightest–Gail’s mom had been her best friend since they were both in pigtails. But she was more of an Aunt to Gail than Aunt Violet, Vera, or Myrtle had ever been. Gail had grown up in her arms almost as much as her mother’s. She had been present at every recital, swimming meet, and birthday party that Gail could recall.   

“Gail, sweetheart!” Helen had no sooner opened the door than had her arms around Gail, Lauren, and the plate Lauren precariously held out in her hands. “What a surprise!”

“Gail’s here?” she heard her mother’s shouted inquiry in the background. The house smelled overwhelmingly of Chesterfields. By the time Helen backed away, Gail spied her mother’s stout frame just behind Helen’s right shoulder. When she walked out from behind her best friend, she sported a cautious and confused smile and a smoking cigarette in her right hand. Helen had towered over Lucy since the sixth grade and Gail had always found the dichotomy of the two women charming. 

No one had called Gail’s mother, Lucille Cousins, by her full name since her Christening. She was Lucy since the day she was born. The fifth of John and Agnes’ children, followed only by Peter, she was a rabble-rouser who had gotten away with almost everything her entire life. It was a quality her siblings both resented terribly and found irresistibly endearing, despite their own better judgments. This quality first made itself apparent when she was weaning–simple acts that tested the boundaries of her family’s patience like pushing her food jars off of her highchair, pooping as soon as her diaper was changed, and killing all of her mother’s indoor plants with the bathwater. Being the fifth child suited her just fine. Most of her mischief either went undetected or was for the most part tolerated by her parents who were so preoccupied with the demands of having so many children to pay much attention to any of them. When Lucy realized she could diffuse just about any situation with a mournful, watery-eyed blue gaze she took it further. In third grade, she talked Sister Gertrude into a second recess simply because, “God created such a beautiful day, don’t you think he’d want the little children outside?” By the time she was in high school,, she was notorious in her hometown for her devil-may-care attitude, too preoccupied in classes thinking up what her next prank or joke would be to pay much attention to lessons. Consequently, her hands were often red from ruler slaps. 

Where she had fallen short as a mother she shined as a grandmother. Lauren’s kids shone under her playful confidence, always eager to please her. And she loved poking fun at them more than anything, or plotting pranks with them together. “What helps is that they’re not my responsibility,” she told Lauren the week before when they were first tackling Grandma Agnes’ house. “You’ll understand someday dear–all the pressure of motherhood is gone when you’re a grandmother. You get to just swoop in whenever there’s trouble then go home and have a drink without being riddled by questions or irreverent meltdowns. It’s glorious.” 

“Sweetheart, is everything alright?” Her mother said now, who quickly gave her a hug before reaching out for the still drowsed Lauren, freshly woken up from her car nap and cooing at her grandmother with delight. 

Gail was being ushered in now. Wordlessly, Helen walked them down the hallway, pulled up an extra chair to the kitchen table for Gail between Millie and JoAnne, and poured her a glass of tonic with a lime. With a shake of her head, Gail declined the gin–school pick-up was only an hour and change away. The table was home to the women’s time-worn cribbage board and a smattering of finger sandwiches, highball glasses, and ashtrays. “Yes ma’am, I’m so sorry to interrupt but I wanted to ask you something,” her mother raised an eyebrow as she snuffed out her cigarette to keep it from the grabbing baby. 

Gail fancied this moment to be an opportunity for some showmanship, but her removal of the tinfoil from her grandmother’s plate was disappointingly awkward and loud. All senses of buildup and drama were lost. 

The five women stared at the plate blankly. With hope, Gail looked up at her mother’s face. She had expected at the very least surprise and delight, with a dash of shock. Instead, she found very little. She followed her mother’s gaze to the plate, only realizing then that the brown biscuits weren’t much to look at—brown on brown, lumpy.

It was all about the flavor.

“You interrupted our cribbage game for some brown . . .cookies?”

“For chocolate and deliciousness,” she insisted, defensiveness in her voice. “It was one of grandma’s recipes–I found her process notebook in the kitchen.” She passed the plate around to the women. “You don’t recognize these, mom?”

“Not in the faintest,” she responded, pulling a cookie from the plate and passing it to Helen. Quietly, the older women took contemplative nibbles of the cookies. As soon as the flavor hit their palettes, they were besotted. “Oh, Good Lord in heaven, child what is this? I have got to have this recipe,” Millie exclaimed. Millie had come into the fold through the women’s Bible study when she and her family had moved to town a decade or so ago. She was round and congenial, with hair that had once been red, was now white, but dyed to more of a coral color. She almost exclusively wore coral, yellow, and salmon, which gave her the distinct air of a woman permanently on a beach vacation. The beach was nowhere nearby. The other women nodded in agreement. 

Gail pulled out the notebook from her purse.

“You’ve really never had these, mom?” Her mom swallowed. 

“Oh, believe me, honey, I think I’d remember these,” she said, waving her half-eaten cookie in the air with her free hand while the baby reached up wildly for it. 

“But there are about 50 different versions of this recipe in here,” Gail responded, placing the notebook in front of her mother. Lucy finished off her cookie, wiped off her hands, and started thumbing through. 

“I don’t know what you’re implying, Gail. I would be hard-pressed to believe anyone could hide something this miraculous,” JoAnne chimed in. Without responding, Lucy flipped through the notebook to the first entry. “1938,” she said. 

“They go until 1977,” Gail responded. 

Lucy closed the notebook with assertiveness and pushed it an inch or so away from herself. Like a woman donning a stunning mink stole, she assumed the mien of a woman unruffled. Of course, that was a lie Gail recognized. She had seen the same false air about her mother when she had come down from making her valedictorian speech at high school graduation without thanking–or even acknowledging–either of her parents. 

“I’m sure you just forgot, Mom,” Gail said quietly. 

“It’s no matter, sweetheart. You should have seen all of the notebooks I had to throw away. It was an obsession, Completely without rhyme or reason. There’s no way she could have remembered all of the recipes she came up with over the years. This one probably just fell into the abyss of her own mind.” 

They locked eyes across the table. There was no way this recipe was simply cast to the wayside. She knew it. Her mother knew it too. But her gaze plainly said to drop the matter. The silence was broken by JoAnne. “So Jerry tried to leave the house this weekend–I caught him sneaking out with his tennis bag over one shoulder while I was cleaning up breakfast–naturally, he was nowhere to be found when cleanup started,” she began.

Gail’s mind wandered back to the notebook, sitting in front of her mother. Its cover was a faded red. It was such a lovely, worn thing. Gail had never been one to journal, herself. And she supposed if she had the opportunity to ask Grandma Agnes about this notebook–this and all of the others her mother had pitched–she would first scold Gail for being so nosy, then insist that she didn’t journal either. These were strictly research. 

Gail’s gaze fell back to her mother, now absorbed in conversation with her friends and the game in front of them. Little Lauren was on the floor now. Lucy herself was a caring mother with firm boundaries whose humor was usually self-serving. There were proper things to discuss with your children. So a lot of things, with her, just went unsaid–she was well-practiced in partitions. It was half the reason why she was so good at playing pranks, Gail reasoned. Even here, she realized, as her mother relaxed and seemingly forgot Gail was there, her laugh was more boisterous, her jokes more cynical and sarcastic. She was letting herself just be around these women. 

Lauren crawled over to Gail’s feet, attempting to teeth on her plush socks, graying on the bottoms. She picked the little girl up. As she looked at her little daughter, she thought of Grandma Agnes–banned by her Bible study from bringing cakes, their waistlines losing the battle with their sweet tooth’s. For a moment, she mourned her half-knowledge of her mother. And her mother’s half-knowledge of Grandma Agnes. That morning, before their adventure in the kitchen, Gail had packed up her Grandmother’s closet. She thought of its contents now, the pressed tailored suits that still smelled like dry cleaning. There were at least a dozen tailored suits amassed over the years–one for every occassion. She had admired the fully-lined camel pencil skirts of worsted wool until she tried it on herself–breathable but too itchy. The single-breasted mustard suit jacket, Grandma had worn to every Easter service that Gail could recall. She could still see her in her mind’s eye, sitting with practiced grace at the end of the shining wood pew at St. Claire’s Cathedral downtown amidst all of her children, and all of her children’s children. Then there were pencil skirt-dresses with matching cropped jackets–things she had worn to the bank or to make a call on Pastor Philip. Cotton blends, tweed, velvet trims–each carefully stowed away in its own storage bag. She had been buried in a canvas-textured blue tweet number–dark blue velvet trim, with the rest  a muted cornflower that would have complimented her eyes beautifully, had they been opened. Before the viewing, she had seen her mother adjust her Grandmother’s favorite brooch in the casket. It was a bold move conducted discretely, but lovingly, knowing that her mother would never approve of entering eternity with such an oversight on her breast. 

Gail wondered if she should share the recipe after all.  Maybe there had been a reason for her to go through the trouble of shimmying up a step ladder just to conceal the book. Maybe it had been her intention to lay the cookies to rest, too. 

And what kind of person disrespected the secrets of the dead? 

She felt careless and clumsy for having brought the cookies here in the first place. She never would have guessed that her grandmother would have kept a cookie from her own children, especially for that long. 

To be continued…

The Cheerful Giver, part 1

For Jodi, Alyson, and Molly

Was it a magnetism thing that caused dust to accumulate in certain corners of a home? Gail had been cleaning for what felt like a lifetime, crawling on her hands and knees, dusting floorboards, shimmying her body underneath grandmother Agnes’ bed frame, and ruminating on magnets. It was time for a break. She sat up on her knees, brushed her wavy blond-ish hair out of her eyes. Her gaze fell on little Lauren, who was giggling in her walker, gumming on a wooden teething toy. The 7-month old’s bib was soaked through with drool. Gail let out a heavy sigh and crossed the room to her diaper bag and purse, which were propped up on a tower of moving boxes stacked five high. She pulled out a new bib and looked down at her watch–11:03 a.m. She looked around, weary. Joy and Paul Jr. would be out of school a little after 3. She’d need to be home with dinner prepped around 2:30, so she’d need to leave around 2. She pulled the velcro apart from behind Lauren’s neck and wiped it with a handkerchief, then replaced the bib with the new one and stroked the little girl’s face. Her bright brown eyes smiled at her mother wildly, then squinted with affection. 

        Gail pulled the scrunchy off of her wrist and pulled back her hair. The room was empty of furniture and belongings, save for the boxes, the bed frame, and a few pictures leaning against a wall. She looked down at Lauren. 

       “Which room should we dive into next, sweet pea?” The baby cooed in response. “You’re probably right. The kitchen. Ugh.” It was the fifth day of cleaning up her grandmother’s home. She and Grandmother Agnes hadn’t been close—she had been a pleasant woman but a proper one, the daughter of Danish immigrants. In Gail’s youth, Agnes taught her practical things like fixing a proper tea and blotting lipstick. As a grandmother, some would call her starched–at least, Gail would. Agnes smelled like expensive, heady perfumes and looked like she was headed to church. Kind of an ice queen.

But how could she not be? If she was being honest with herself, Gail had a lot of admiration for a woman who could manage to put on lipstick and iron her shirts every day with seven little ones pulling at her skirts. Especially with a husband away at war when many of them were in diapers. Good for her for keeping it all together and never missing Sunday mass. 

Gail looked down at herself and sighed–a baggy sweatshirt and jeans, unruly hair absentmindedly piled on her head. She hadn’t showered in, what, two days? But then she thought about little Joy and Paul, the way looking into their eyes brought them back to the babies they had once been. She still felt tethered to them in a real way, even when their little clumsy bodies clambered into the school bus each morning. It was like a part of her soul went away with them to keep watch. And Little Lauren, whose life thus far was just playtime and giggles and cuddles with her older siblings, well, she wasn’t keeping tabs on Gail’s appearance. They just adored each other, as-is. And when he came home from the bank each day, her husband, Paul Sr., assured her he didn’t care about her sloppy appearance, but she could feel a creeping disappointment in herself for letting herself go. 

They had met in college, both pool rats. Back then–when her stomach had been taut, her body firm–there wasn’t a girl’s swim team at the college yet, so she swam in her free time and volunteered at the men’s meets. Paul had kept up with it post-college, of course, stopping by the pool at the club a few times a week before going into work. It helped to mitigate the stress of having three kids and climbing the ladder at work. Before the kids, they had gone swimming together, but that space for herself had fallen to the wayside. Three babies had softened her around the edges, plumped her up in the rear and other regions. She was still slender, just, well, no amount of Jane Fonda videotapes seemed to narrow up those hips, no matter how high she thrust them. 

If she was being honest, what she missed the most was the way her mind went both blank and focused in the lap pool. Workout videos had a purpose but got boring. At times they felt a little scandalous. Gail was convinced that one of those women in the back of Fonda’s–a bendy perky brunette with an impossibly tiny waist and breasts that were nothing short of miraculous–had to have been a stripper.

She shook it off. Shuddering her wavy blonde head. 

“Okay Lauren, let’s conquer the kitchen next.” She picked up the baby and made her way down the hall, expertly balancing the 17-lb bubbler on her hip while grabbing a thick towel from the linen closet as they made their way down the hall. She thought maybe she should just go ahead and pack up the linen closet. As organized as it was, it would take about ten minutes. Every sheet pressed. Every towel uniformly folded. Good grief. But no, that would just be procrastination. The kitchen was the next big challenge to be conquered. 

She set up Lauren on a towel on the linoleum floor with some teething toys, then in a false jog made her way back down the hallway to the bedroom where she grabbed a couple of cassette tapes from her purse. Back in the kitchen, she popped in Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” and fast-forwarded to its second track. She pressed down on the smooth plastic play button and closed her eyes in satisfaction as the drum crashed into the mellow bass guitar and the song began. 

She hummed along to Stevie Nicks’ droning alto while half dancing, half walking around the room, assessing where to begin. Her plush socks slid across the linoleum floor, making her feel as smooth as Michael Jackson. She looked down at Lauren, making the exaggerated faces of mime as she went along just to see the baby’s gummy smile. “Lord, forgive me for loving Stevie Nicks so much,” she said out loud. 

The first thing she observed was that she needed a lot more boxes and packing paper to accommodate all the dishes and Corningware. She made a mental note to drop by the grocery store and ask for old newspapers the next time she went in. Still not sure of where to start, she opened all of the cabinets one by one, just to see what was inside. The drawers all had dividers. Everything was in its right place. Extra things like table napkins and dish towels were stowed away in decorative biscuit tins that must be over a hundred years old and very well-loved. 

She reached the overhead cabinet to the right of the kitchen sink. It opened with barely any effort, the magnetic latch well worn. The earthy aromas of cinnamon, coriander, and anise greeted her. Endless bottles of spices and herbs, all organized to perfection in neat little rows, made up the bottom shelf. Above them were various flours and baking powders, lined up like little soldiers awaiting orders. Lord, Grandma Agnes could bake. Christmas at her house was an explosion of confections. She baked profusely and passionately—delicate wafer-like anise cookies, homemade Brunkager, and Pebber Nodder. Homemade peppermint patties and gingerbread men. The little warmth that she exuded usually was sourced from a pan in the oven.

Gail reached up for the tiny vial of lemon extract. She unscrewed the tiny ribbed red lid and breathed in deep.

She would never forget the sugared-lemon scent of her fifth birthday–the slick feel of her bathing suit and grass clippings on her ankles as she and her friends screamed and jumped through the sprinkler on the lawn. The pinata of a donkey strung from the tree, which her friend Jessica had finally cracked open, a shower of taffy and cheap bubblegum showering her little brown head. Grandma Agnes had arrived early with the most incredible cake yet. Gail loved lemonade more than anything. She used to set up lemonade stands in the front yard–they lived at the end of a cul-de-sac, no one drove by–so she was free to sample her wares by the cupful. Grandma Agnes had shown up with a four-layer lemonade cake with lemon-cream icing, expertly piped and decorated with tiny pink sugared roses. Just the thought of it made her want to squirm and giggle with delight again. 

Grandma Agnes approached each confection like a scientist. Gail knew now how much effort went into a cake like that, and for Grandmother Agnes more so than most. Her mother had told her once that after the depression, when things had gotten better and the family was back on their feet, she would sometimes come home from school and find the freezer full of rejected cakes. “Her Bible Study actually banned her from bringing any more cakes at one point,” her mom’s breezy laugh came through the phone,  “none of them could fit into their skirts, their waistlines had expanded so much.” Agnes was constantly tinkering with her recipes, not content with anything short of perfection. Rejected cakes or her failures were either stored in the freezer or given away to some local charity case or group. 

Gail pulled a small stepladder out from between the refrigerator and cabinetry and dragged it across the room, then pulled out a small box. These spices and herbs shouldn’t go to waste. She could pack these up nicely and bring them home with her. 

Little Lauren plopped over on her back on the towel. 

Gail climbed up the ladder, figuring it was best to work from the top down like she did when she was cleaning. All-Purpose flour, pastry flour, cake flour, bread flour, self-rising flour, Semolina. They were all stored in tightly sealed Hermes clamp jars, their labels, all written in Agnes’ compact and curled handwriting, taped on tight, their paper yellowed with age. She pulled them each down, using both hands, and placing them safely in the basin of the sink. She was pulling out the last one when her hand hit something slight and flat leaning against the jar. When she pulled out the jar, she heard it slide and drop flat on the top part of the cabinet. After placing the jar with the others, she climbed back up. 

The wire-ring notebook was heavily discolored and stained, if not a little warped. Its pages, yellowed with age, turned crisp and easily. Here, Grandmother Agnes’ script was more casual and unadorned–the loops wider and unrestricted. The first entry was dated September 6, 1953.

Kids are at school. Had some of Doris’ drop pecan cookies yesterday and found them lacking. She was boastful about her ½ and ½ use of brown and white sugars, but the overall effect left something to the imagination. Also, they were dreadfully flat–butter should have been whipped and warm. Got the recipe from her anyway, to tinker with. I believe there’s something to be had with the half-brown sugar, half-white sugar combination, and my imagination will pick up where hers petered off. 

The recipe followed. 

Many of Agnes’ recipe books and baking books were well-loved and worn at her mother’s home on the other side of town. Agnes had kept them all safely stowed away on a shelf in her office. It was unlike her to misplace something like this. Plus, Agnes was dreadfully short, stowing it away on the top shelf would have taken a memorable amount of effort. Gail thumbed through the pages–it looked like a dedicated journal to just one recipe. One of her process notebooks. Mom had told her about these, how Grandma would fiddle with a recipe until it was perfect, then catalog it in one of her “Master Volume” notebooks, all of which were stored at mom’s house. She would have to ask Mom about it Friday when they were working on it together. She knew better than to interrupt her mother’s cribbage game now. Few things in her mother’s life were as sacred. 

She thumbed through the book–the recipe sounded unfamiliar, and yet, there were over two dozen iterations of it in the pages of this faded notebook, with dates spanning over a decade throughout the entries. She went to the second entry, dated a few weeks later. 

It’s amazing how something as simple as salt can awaken all of the suppressed flavors hidden within a cookie dough. Adding just a pinch–approximately half a tsp. here completely transforms this otherwise bland cookie. Marvelous stuff. Playful and tender on the tongue. 

Then the next, about a month after that. 

Today waited for the cookie to beckon from the oven. Between eleven and twelve minutes, it really coaxed my nose. They had a wonderful, warm aroma, and came out a lovely golden brown just around the edges. Doris had said nine but leaving it in the additional time led to a bit less of a doughy mess when cooled. Ate the whole batch before the kids came home.

Gail laughed under her breath at the thought of Grandmother Agnes rabidly eating a dozen cookies on her own before her seven children descended on her household. She understood the impulse. The only sweet tooth in the world that rivaled her own were those of her children and husband. She seldom baked for that reason. She had very little self-restraint and neither did they. A brownie pan seldom made it an evening–shoot, an hour in their house. Birthday cakes rarely made it more than a day or two. Either they ate the whole thing compulsively or they overindulged from the outset and made themselves sick in the process. In those instances, Gail would quietly dispose of the crumbling remains of the cake in the trash, so that the tummy aches didn’t last more than a day or so. 

Lauren was making a wild attempt to nom on the foot of the stool now. 

“Oh honey, no, no, no,” Gail said, realizing her own distraction at finding the notebook. She scrambled down, the notebook in hand, and picked up the gumming baby. After grabbing a wooden spoon for Lauren from the drawer to the left of the oven, they plonked down on the floor together, Lauren in her lap with the spoon and Gail with the notebook. Then, Lauren attempted to get to the notebook, tiny raccoon hands grasping wildly at the aged pages in Gail’s hand. Gail kissed the baby on the forehead and raised the notebook overhead, craning her neck upwards, and continued to read. 

Stumbled on something truly remarkable this morning. Got the kids all off to school and went back to work on this recipe only to realize I was out of pecans. Found a bar of baking chocolate and chopped it up, added those in instead. Must confess, the batter barely made it to the pan. 

Now that was something. Grandmother Agnes furiously gobbling up a dozen cookies after they’d cooled she could imagine. But eating raw cookie dough was something else entirely. What had she been like, early in the morning when she was younger? Gail had always just assumed that she woke up flawlessly, her hair adeptly subdued in rollers, her perfectly manicured hands clinking against a coffee cup while she scrambled eggs for her brood? Gail had never really thought about it. She couldn’t imagine the matriarch’s stern mouth without lipstick on, let alone licking sugared, sticky cookie dough off of a stainless steel spoon, then busily jotting notes in a notebook. Had the pen ever stuck to her fingertips? Had Grandmother Agnes at one point, ever, in her life been sloppy?

Her neck was starting to ache. At least Lauren seemed sufficiently distracted by the wooden spoon in her mouth. Cautiously, she lowered the notebook and thumbed through it. Sometimes it didn’t seem like the recipe had been tinkered with at all, that the cookies themselves were just an excuse to indulge and journal a bit. 

“Lauren, sweetie, I think we only have one option,” she said, kissing the curl of hair on the crown of the baby’s head. She put the baby back on the towel, spoon in hand, and started preheating the oven. She pulled the all-purpose flour from the sink, put the salted butter on the countertop to warm up a bit, pulled out the hand mixer, two large bowls, and assembled the rest of the ingredients from their various prescribed spots in the kitchen. Luckily, there were plenty of wooden spoons in the drawer, Lauren could hold onto hers. 

While the oven and butter warmed, she packed away the spices and the other flours. Grandma Agnes, by way of her mother and aunts, had a lifelong vexation with people who were too impatient to think about how much those small details matter. It was a rant she had gone on so many times in her life that all seven of her children could recite the greater portion of it, and they would, whenever they were tasked to bake for their own families, with a mocking but loving impersonation of their own ornery mother. “If you can’t even wait long enough to let the oven get to the temperature you don’t deserve to be in the kitchen at all,” they’d begin. “If you put it in when it’s preheating it won’t cook evenly, it’ll end up a disastrous mess. Why not put the whole thing in the trash, to begin with?”

It was a short, but effective speech. Neither Gail nor her brothers and cousins would ever dream of not letting their oven get to temperature before putting in any dish. And the tirade was still recreated by whoever was hosting Thanksgiving, in the wee hours of the morning when the oven was first lit, the giant bird buttered, stuffed, and seasoned beyond recognition, waiting to bake low and slow for hours on end, ritualistically basted between cups of coffee and sneaking bites and samplings of the various pies, soufflés, and savory sides that proliferated the kitchen. 

Having thumbed through the notebook, Gail had taken some mental notes. The butter should be room temperature and whipped with the sugar separately before adding the egg, then whipped again. The mixture of dry ingredients should be added gradually afterward. 

She had made it to the scooping of the dough with an ice cream scoop—another piece of expert advice—when she remembered Grandma Agnes’ note about eating the batter. She contemplated it, weighing the pros and cons and possible salmonella in her mind for a moment. Then, guiltily meeting little Lauren’s gaze on the floor, she dove her finger into the batter. “Eating raw eggs is bad for you,” she told the little girl, who was starting to fuss. It was lunchtime and soon nap time. Her few hours of relative freedom were slipping away fast. Looking down at Lauren, she knew that the baby’s meltdown was imminent. Gail let out a resigned sigh, scooped up some batter from the bowl, and dove it into her mouth. 

“Holy shit.” 

The exclamation was muffled by the batter, but the sentiment was clear enough, even to the baby on the floor in front of her, who was temporarily distracted from her onsetting fuss and gazing up at her mother in surprise. She even raised her faint, developing eyebrows.

 The flavor was so beyond comprehension. Every olfactory lit up like a Christmas tree with pure joy. Why in the world was it even necessary to bake this? The creamy combination of whipped butter and sugar enchanted her. The touch of salt enhanced it. She was bewitched before a shard of chocolate even graced her tongue. When one finally did, she held it there until it melted. The effect was euphoric. She wanted to cry. Instead, she took another dab from the scoop, then dolloped the remaining batter onto the pan. 

Since she had quartered the recipe she only had to repeat this process seven times or so. She took her time with it, enjoying a sampling from each lump of batter before planting it on the baking sheet. It took a lot of willpower to put them in the oven. 

“Now we wait,” she said to Lauren, picking her up at last. With the baby on her hip, she prepared the bottle one-handed, an action that had once been clumsy and alien to her but now was second nature. She loved her ability to complete most minute tasks with one hand or at times just her foot. It made her feel like a seasoned professional, as far as mothering was concerned. She at least had it down with little ones. Her latest, new challenge was with Joy, who was seven now.  Joy was a perfectionist—a trait possibly inherited from her now-deceased great-grandmother, as it certainly wasn’t from Gail. And the young girl had entered a phase where she would completely fall apart if something didn’t meet her impossibly high expectations. If a finger painting didn’t meet her vision, or if she wasn’t fastest in a foot race–it didn’t matter the circumstance, just the outcome. This obsessiveness manifested in an increased bossiness over her two younger siblings and at times over her parents. Paul was better at handling her in these moments. He merely shrugged her off and kept doing things his way. But for Gail, letting the young girl down deflated her. And being bossed triggered unexpected anxiety that seemed impossible to tame. 

Bottle prepared, baby food, and spoon in hand, she sat the baby in the high chair she had brought and started to feed her. 

After a dozen minutes or so, Lauren’s face orange with carrots, the aroma of the cookies from the oven called to her. Their scent was seductive and rich. The airy, joyous dough had been transformed into something sumptuous and rich in the heat. Beckoned by the creamy scent of melted chocolate, she handed Lauren her bottle and made her way to the oven, grabbing a worn mitt from the same drawer as the wooden spoons.

They were a rich, golden brown now, firm and crisp on the edges, soft in the centers. They were too hot to eat right away, but Gail knew it would only be a few long minutes before she would try one. The thought of letting them cool completely was laughable. 

She grabbed a box and started to empty the wooden spoon drawer into it, which only took about a minute. Then she grabbed a cookie and went back to her seat at the table with Lauren. 

“If you eat all of your carrot mush, I’ll let you try a bite.” She said to the baby, spooning the last bit of purée into the child’s mouth. Then she picked up the cookie, studying it for just a moment, but it was still soft in the center and began to collapse. She cupped her other hand underneath it and shoved a good deal of it in her mouth. It was a mess of sweet. There was chocolate on her chin, her hands, her fingertips, but although she could feel it, she didn’t give a whip. The cookie itself was toasted to perfection, still slightly fluffed, with a nutty caramelized sweetness. The chocolate elevated what was already delightful to something borderline sinful. 

Licking the chocolate off of her hand, and wiping off her face, Gail was left to contemplate not just the revelation on her plate, but the second conundrum this miracle introduced: how had she never had this before? What in the world was this cookie? How had her mother and grandmother kept this secret from her?

She put a nibble to the baby’s mouth, who gleefully giggled in response. She studied the child’s face. “Mom would know,” she thought to herself. Decidedly, she packed up the remaining six cookies, whisked up the satiated infant in her arms, and brought them both to the car.

To be continued . . .

The Taste of Water

When Henry Daubigne realized his water had regained flavor he hadn’t held down a meal in three days and he had a fever of 103˚. At the age of 82, he was beginning to fear the worst. Peppery and prone to outburst–his family, for the most part, left him alone. The little ones peered underneath the doorframe from time to time, then ran away giggling. But he barely noticed. Thinking beyond the world outside of his own pestiferous body was nearly impossible, as it so tediously reminded him of its disintegration. His aches were thorough and all-encompassing, rooted in each joint and reaching deep into his marrow. And somehow he felt brittle and dry as if he could crack like an eggshell at the slightest touch. Anything beyond sipping the water his grandson left by his bedside was a chore. 

The cool water cascaded across his cracked lips and over his dry, white tongue. Suddenly, Henry was yanked by his tastebuds back to the early days of his marriage to the evening of his twentieth birthday, when his wife Loraine attempted to bake his favorite delicacy, blackberry danishes, for the first and only time.

They came out all wrong. 

The pastry dough, traditionally thin and as fragile as a snowflake was as thick and flavorless as an uncooked pie crust. The tar-like preserve on the inside was bitter, the blackberries unripened and piping with seeds. Henry was filled with adoration for his young wife, despite the gooey mess on his plate. So, together, they suffered through every danish. They sat across from one another at their thick oak table, eating the dessert with a masquerade of enthusiasm. The abysmal taste in their mouths was so preoccupying that they could think of little else, their conversation was monosyllabic, with their limited commentary adeptly toeing the line between compliments and pure lies. “Oh darling, I can tell this pastry must have taken a lot of effort,” Henry remarked, his jaw aching with the effort to chew. At least twenty seeds lodged along his gum line, causing him quite a bit of discomfort. His tongue desperately darted around within his mouth, attempting to clear them away. “Mmmm,” she nodded, across the table from him, her eyebrows raised in pained concentration before uttering a forced noise of enjoyment and gulping an entire flute of champagne. Soon after, Henry reached one bite too bitter and raw for his face not to contort in discomfort. Ashamed of his negative reaction, and fearing disappointing his beautiful young wife, he choked down the bit of danish as discretely as possible, following it with a large gulp of water. When he looked up she was staring at him across the table. Her face also contorted, though not in agony, as he had been a moment before, but in an attempt to hold down a laugh. It erupted out of her, loud and cloddish, like a hen taken by surprise. It was a sound so far from ladylike and so blissfully out of character that Henry erupted too. Soon they were crying on the floor with laughter. Their cheeks were stained with tears, clearing the taste of dough and blackberries out of their mouths with the sweet taste of each other’s lips.

It had been so many years since he had tasted anything resembling those sour danishes, and many more years since Loraine was taken by the earth. He had been happy once, loved. He could not let go of that feeling, that taste. Therefore, Henry could not stop drinking the water. He let it rush in him. It felt as if his sickbed evaporated, the years shed away. It formed a small waterfall out of the corners of his mouth and below his bottom lip and pooled in the dimple of his concave chest. He drank in hot pursuit of an escape. But that birthday evening, those feelings eluded him in the bottom of his glass. So he took up his quest again, this time in the pitcher on his bedside table. His joints creaked with the effort of lifting it to drink, but he found it was not there either, and the taste of those sour danishes in his mouth was waning fast.  He had not had enough. He dragged himself out of bed, his swollen belly sloshing on the hardwood floor under his linen nightshirt, then army-crawled to his filled bathtub, where he drank the murky bathwater as a pig would out of a trough. He drank with increased fervor and desperation, half of his head submerged at a time, mouth wide under the surface—he gulped. 

When she came back the second time, the first glimpse he caught of her in his mind’s eye was her beautiful curled hair, the color of freshly made caramel. Then she came back to him in waves, deep impressions of the details he had clung to over the years as his memories faded. He recalled his intimate knowledge of the shadows that gathered in her collarbone each evening. Then he could feel the delicate sag of skin that appeared above her belly button after she had recovered from giving birth to their five children. Her bouquet of scents came in next–warmed pencil shavings and lavender when she came in from doing laundry in the spring. He could taste the tang of her. Then finally, he caught sight of the one caramel curl that always seemed to fall between her eyes. Her delicate wrist shooed the ringlet away as she would a housefly. He craved her details deeply. The water was bringing her back. The water made her real. 

He drank his way toward her into confusion and a brutal headache. Then, his whole body ballooned. At first glance a passerby may have assumed there was some large fish on the floor, seeking the distant ocean. But no one passed by. After a half-hour, his knees gave out from under him. Still, he drank, pausing only to vomit–his body’s last desperate plea to desist. But the call for caution was nothing compared to the appetite of his starved soul. Instead, he was beside himself with pain that he had lost his only shot at retrieving his wife. He needed more to bring his sweet Loraine back. He continued to drink.

By that time he was able to resurrect entire memories in increasing detail–like echoes in reverse. The heat of an old argument warmed his age-spotted skin. What had started out as some petty confusion over how many chairs to have at the Thanksgiving table had degenerated into a chaotic review of disagreements and resentments long archived and stowed away within them. He laughed at it now, how their anger with one another had somehow passed undetected by their guests, despite the bitter glares they cast at one another across the table. How, after everyone had left, they had taken up arms again, only to end up in a torrid of sheets and a smattering of tiny bruises as they worked out their fury, without words, in their marriage bed. He wove his way through his own archives until he was once more cradling her frigid foot in his lap, numb with sorrow, desperately trying to massage the heat out of her feverish head and distribute it throughout her once colorful and buoyant body. But this time he abandoned his grief for the joy of her. With his inventory complete, Henry simply turned it over in his mind and began again at their beginning, when they were just two children, barely able to walk, playing together by the stream while the women of the town gathered together to wash. He remembered how transfixed he had been, even then, by the delicate curve of her upper lip. The feeling of the smooth stones in his uncalloused hands as they threw rocks into the ebbing waters. 

When eventually his eldest son, Christophe, came into check on his father, he found Henry passed out on the bathroom floor, the tub overturned, in a pool of water—twitching like a goldfish,  with a smile on his face. 

Henry spent the rest of his days laughing across the table with his long-deceased wife, making love to her as if she were on earth once more. Cherishing the curve of her body alongside his own, the musk of her plaited hair on her pillow, how it smelled like warm, cut hay and the bright sun. He could bask in her scent for eternity, and gladly, having missed it for so long. He passed a few days later, of what would become known as cerebral edema. Although if you asked him he would argue that he greeted death with a soul finally satiated after thirsting so long.

A Conspiracy of Owls

The sun hadn’t even crested the loblolly’s in the meadow and bedlam seeped into the periphery of the unseasonably sweltering morning. The air was pungent, like a camellia with wilted downy petals, its once untainted allure succumbed to a rotten future. Camellias didn’t just wither. They loitered beyond their tenure, an ominous blemish amongst a dense virility of glossed leaves. Their scent beguiled each passerby, coaxing them to heed their threat. The future is unforgiving to the precious, it said. 

Vicky Owens sneered at the flowers as she passed and fantasized about pulling each and every limp bloom from its final resting place and ferally throwing them onto the gravel road. But she resisted this temptation. Only because if she did pluck them up, her hands would absorb their floral stench. She’d hated camellias her entire life for this reason. Their scent reminded her of her dead grandmother, Rose. 

Rose, who would never let anyone forget about her days as a dancer in Las Vegas. Rose, who had exited the world with nicotine-stained teeth encased by wrinkled, scarlet lips.

Vicky would not go quietly into the night. She self-administered Botox to counteract the deep crease that had formed between her eyebrows. She moisturized, exfoliated, oiled, waxed, and plucked herself to perfection ritualistically, studying each rebellious pore in the ultra-magnifying mirror on her vanity table. Every week, on Tuesdays, she made the 45-minute drive into the city to have her hair cut and colored to the honey brown hue of her youth. She liked to imagine the chemicals suffocating her grey hairs into obedience. On Thursdays she got a manicure and pedicure, relishing the swift, abrasive strokes of Ginnie, her Vietnamese nail technician who patiently grated away the wear and tear of Vicky’s life from her worn and weathered hands and feet. 

It was when her son, Garrett, failed out of college for the second time Vicky succeeded in permanently mutilating her once beautiful left hand. Her wedding ring had gotten caught up in the framing of the 42” flat screen television when she threw it, with great gusto, off of the second-story porch of their home, and onto the hood of his car, which she was still making payments on at the time. The television had been a birthday gift for him two years prior. It fell to its thunderous demise amongst her own tortured screams. 

It took great effort to artfully avoid discussion of her “degloving” at social functions afterward. Eventually, when it did heal, she never regained movement in the finger. Needless to say, her wedding ring had also stayed boxed in her nightstand for quite some time, something she and Bill never discussed. 

Now, on her right hand, a nail struggled to emerge from under the skin of her battle scar. She hadn’t spoken to Garrett in the two years since she had kicked his slothful, lazy, ungrateful, puckered ass out. Bill was left to deal with him, issuing his monthly $1,300 allowance, pulling strings to quietly get him re-enrolled into a local, less challenging community college. Garrett was a disgrace to everything they’d fought so hard to have in their lives. He was unworthy of their four homes, three in the states and one in the Virgin Islands. He did not deserve a single one of the eight vehicles registered to their names, though he still drove the X3 which bore the brunt of her outrage that day. They paid for the hood to be replaced, of course. 

Everything everyone else could ever want the Owens made sure to have at least three of. Sadly, money could not buy them the eldest son they could be proud of. Garrett was a defect on the face of their nearly perfected existence. He was too fat for military school, too indolent for academia, too insecure for any kind of natural leadership. Exhausted by him, Vicky had decided it was better to not acknowledge him at all. She had made a solemn oath to herself to never accept disappointment. Garrett had amounted to nothing more than that: a disappointment. 

They were almost done with their morning walk now, Vicky and Bill. She had almost forgotten her husband again. What was it he had been going on and on about? Their real estate investments? Had he mentioned Garrett? He seemed anxious. She was glad to have her hair appointment later that day. Let Bill worry himself to death at the house–she would be elsewhere. 

Vicky had money of her own to play with, and plenty of it. Her incredibly successful interior design business had earned her over six figures and a featured article in Southern Life last year, affording her the freedom to embark on a Peruvian yoga vacation with her best friend Mina, as well as a complete renovation of the bedroom and porch that her now unmentionable son had once occupied. It also funded her pigs. They had brought her some satisfaction over the past two years. For one spring they had made her the talk of the Jubilee community and the trophy of everyone’s Instagram feeds. That had been back when the pigs had been young and cute. Before their muddy stye had taken up over a quarter acre of their two-acre estate, which was one of the largest in Jubilee. She had temporarily overlooked the pig’s oafishness because her sow, a 750-pound Angeln Saddleback named Aunt Hamilton, had earned a gold ribbon at the county fair. Vicky had decided to get into pig farming shortly after she had successfully obtained her pilot’s license and immediately after dropping her second attempt to become a cellist. During her third lesson her teacher, someone of great acclaim that a client had referred her, had cast a judgmental glance at her shorn finger. That had been the end of that. 

Vicky had served on the board of the Charlotte Chamber society for 5 years, and since joining had annually tried to take her appreciation of music a step further by becoming a musician herself. Through this habit, she had collected a $20,000 piano, a $7,000 violin, and a $15,000 harp––which she had actually greatly enjoyed before the fateful finger slice––as well as the $12,000 cello. The pig farming had been a whim after she drank five martinis while rewatching Babe one night.

After her purchase of Aunt Hamilton, she had coerced one of the local farmers from outside Jubilee, James Johnson, into breeding one of his pigs with hers and splitting the drift between them. The piglets had been adorable last autumn. At the time, she’d had her hands full with the redecoration of a few show homes in the community, so she hired a local man Mr. Johnson had recommended, Ben Cole, to live in their in-law suite and manage the pigs for her. She’d paid for $10,000 worth of the best electric fencing on the market, not to mention hundreds of dollars in organic feed and everything he’d need, on top of paying Ben a part-time competitive salary and providing him with housing––incredible, impeccably decorated housing––with all utilities included. And it would be impossible not to take into account the wining and dining, because she had invited Ben over for family dinners multiple times a week since he’d moved in, and even went so far as to take him out on occasion. 

And yet, Ben, in a matter of a few months, had proven himself untrustworthy. 

It started with the weed. Ben had gone out with a friend of his, a local strawberry farmer, and came back wreaking of it. Vicky herself had never engaged in drug use of any sort, save the prescription medications her doctor gave her––with Garrett in their life, who wouldn’t need the occasional Vicodin?––but Vicky didn’t see the point in compromising her precious brain cells by smoking anything. It was beneath her. 

The next day, when she knew Ben would be out, she ventured into the in-law suite. It was her house, after all, and they had no formal lease in place. She found her beautiful home a complete and utter disgrace. It smelled like man sweat. There were fingerprints on all of the doorknobs and doors. The bed was unmade and from what she could smell, the sheets had not been washed in some time. Dirty clothes, books, and lord-knows-what-else were strewn all over the 800-square foot space. Thin layers of dust coated every built-in bookshelf and poured concrete countertop. In the bathroom, there were tiny flecks of toothpaste all over the marble sink, counter, and even on the mirror. The tiny trashcan next to the toilet was overflowing with discarded toilet paper used as tissue. In the kitchen, the sink was overflowing with dishes, as was the dishwasher––all he had to push was a button! A single button! She resisted the urge to run the machine herself. Across from the refrigerator, on the kitchen island, a half-drunk Budweiser sat next to an empty plastic wrapper of Ballpark hot dogs, the meat juice still inside.

Her home was being treated like the dormitory of her nightmares. 

As she stood, nearly vomitous with disgust, something caught her eye. A pepper-grinder, a little worn but of too high a quality to belong to Ben. She went over to inspect it with her good hand. A Williams Sonoma pepper grinder, in this hell-hole? What, did he like, freshly ground pepper on his cold hot dogs? The pepper grinder itself didn’t look immediately familiar to her, but her suspicions were raised nonetheless. Had he stolen one of her pepper grinders? She put it back down on the countertop and left in a rage. 

That afternoon Vicky drove to the local Home Depot and purchased a large plastic owl––the kind to keep pests away. Pests like Ben Cole, whom she had unwittingly permitted into her home. She also purchased a home surveillance system. When she got home, she busied herself in the garage, drilling out one of the bird’s large plastic golden eyes and replacing it with one of the small cameras, which she secured in the interior of the hollow owl with duct tape. The drill burned against the plastic, filling the air with the sour scent of charred chemicals, no doubt carcinogens. Security came at a price. By the time Ben got back that evening the owl was firmly placed on the eve of the garage, facing the exterior of the in-law suite. She would tell Bill about her ingenious plot over dinner. He would toast her intrepidness. 

She made eye contact with Ben as he made his way into her house from his car. “Afternoon Mrs. Owens,” he said, tipping a hat he was not wearing. Even his gestures were lies. Before she would have found the exchange charming but now she was awake. She raised her glass and squinted a smirk at him from her patio. “Hello Benjamin,” she said, hoping he picked up on the attempted homage to Elizabeth Taylor in her voice. He did not. “Beautiful day,” he responded, “about to go check on the pigs for you.” Then, just as she had hoped, his eyes drifted upwards, to the owl. “Having trouble with birds Mrs. Owens?” She took a languid sip of her martini, taking great care not to spill on her linen blouse. “You could say that,” she said, slowly moving the martini glass away from her glossed lips and holding it delicately in the air, parallel to her head. “I love owls,” she added, “the sign of Athena, the wise woman, defender of the night.” Ben seemed off-guard as if he could feel the tide changing on him, pulling him under and away. “Owls are pretty cool,” he complied before making his way back toward the stye. She followed him with her eyes feeling much like Athena herself. Empowered. Vigilant. Perceptive. 

When Bill came home she had a specially made dinner ready, his favorite, Braciole Steak. Bill usually took care of the cooking, but she felt like buttering him up that night. Along with the tantalizing aroma of their impending meal, she greeted him with scotch on ice. But not just any scotch–this was some Macallan rare cask they saved for special occasions, served in a Norlan whiskey glass with a single, large square ice cube in its center. 

She realized she had gone overboard with the preparations as soon as she handed him the glass. He got that salty twinkle in his eye. Bill was hoping to get laid tonight. He was sadly mistaken, but that was no matter. 

“What’s the occasion?” he asked, raising a hopeful eyebrow and taking a sip of his scotch without breaking eye contact. 

“Can’t a wife dote on her husband?” she said, loosening his tie. He smiled and slipped his hand downward, toward her ass. She slipped away and coaxed him into getting settled for the evening. When he sat down she walked over to him, resting her good hand on his broad shoulder. “Honey, we need to talk about Ben. . . he needs to go.” 

He turned to her in surprise. “What do you mean? The pigs love him! Did he do something to them? Did one of them get out?” 

“Oh no, he’s out there night and day. It’s more to do with him, himself. The other day he went out with some friends of his and came home wreaking of pot.” 

“Okay . . .” she could tell he was intrigued. Her husband was such a gossip. Knowing that had always served her beautifully. 

“Well, honey, that reflects poorly on us, in the community, him going around odorous like that. And what other drugs could he be doing? So today while he was out I went into the apartment to check on the state of things. . .” Pregnant pauses were a tactic she loved to employ to build up suspense in conversations. She went on to describe the insulting disarray in vivid detail. Over dinner, she addressed the concern of the possibly thieved pepper mill.

Bill did toast to her that evening, eventually. He, too, was in complete shock at the disarray and the sordid intentions of their tenant. Bill loved cooking, even fancied himself pretty decent at it. He knew all of the best and most expensive chefs in town and even considered a few of them friends. He gravely disliked the idea of someone rifling through their kitchen, stealing one of his pepper grinders. What would that lead to next? Cookbooks? Utensils? His copper core pans? 

“Why don’t we take an inventory of the kitchen while we’re at it?” He had gotten up from the table to mill through his spice cabinet, to see if anything else was missing. Five. He counted five pepper grinders. He could not recall whether or not there had been a sixth and that troubled him. But he was a smart man, considered brilliant in some circles, or so he’d been told. He was a corporate consultant and community volunteer, sitting simultaneously on no less than three boards at a time, one of which he was chair of. He was a man who had made a career off of the sound advice he issued. He would not be outwitted by a pig farmer. 

They agreed. A thorough inventory would be conducted. They canceled an entire Sunday’s worth of activities to do so, including one luncheon, a cocktail party, and an invitation-only five-course meal with the executive chef of Shooting Range, one of the most prestigious restaurants in Charlotte. Bill organized the inventory neatly in an Excel spreadsheet. Vicky was his dutiful assistant for about an hour before expressing her fatigue with the matter and leaving with Mina to the local pool, to which they paid $5,000 a year to have a membership. “You’re just so much more organized and methodical about these things than I am, honey.” She said, throwing on a linen cover-up over her one-piece. Her arms were bedecked with several jangling gold bracelets and her honey-colored air looked particularly smooth that morning. Bill secretly hoped that the completion of the inventory would mean an invitation back into their master suite that night. Though he worshipped his wife, it had been years since he had passed an entire night beside her. His chronic snoring had set in at age 30 and only gained gusto as he aged. For that reason, for about the past 20 of their 40-year marriage, he passed the night on the couch or in one of their guest rooms. When the kids were visiting around the holidays, he inflated an air mattress in their master bathroom while Vicky slept with earplugs. 

But by the early afternoon, the inventory was only 3⁄4's completed. Bill gave up and decided instead to watch a documentary on sushi he had noticed was streaming a few weeks prior. Concerned that his abandonment of the inventory might wreck his chances of sleeping next to his wife that night, he took up researching lavish tours of the Japanese countryside for an anniversary vacation the following spring. The documentary stated that the reservations at the sushi chef’s restaurant were already booked two years out, but Bill had connections. He went ahead and booked their flights with his Amex. 

Weeks passed. As far as they could tell, no further kitchen items had been compromised. No further sordid scents emanated from Ben. The owls began to appear everywhere. Just because Vicky hadn’t seen anything yet didn’t mean nothing was amiss. She simply didn’t have enough eyes out. They stopped inviting over Ben for dinner. He went about his piggy business, but Vicky wanted to make sure he knew he was being watched. He saw her gazing pensively at the in-law suite from her back porch as she sipped her morning coffee. Then again from the window frames in the afternoons, and the back patio with a martini in the early evenings. 

After a month of her omnipresence, Ben issued them his formal notice, much to their relief. He fed them some nonsense about getting into his own business and opening a farm-to-table concept with Ralph Cattio, a famous BBQ Chef from Charleston. Bill scoffed at this. He had met Ralph at a fundraiser once, surely he would have reached out to Bill before stealing away his pig farmer, not that he was sad to see Ben leave. A pang of jealousy picked at his heart, especially when he got wind of the fact that Claudia Garamone, the co-founder of Jubilee had set the whole thing up behind his back. 

“Good riddance!” Vicky said, slamming the door behind her. 

The weeks that followed were cursed. Vicky was left to tend for the pigs herself, changing their water, carrying two one-gallon buckets at a time from the house to the trough. She cleaned their bed liner herself, too. The straw caused her arms to break out in hives for at least half of the day. She dreaded the horror and the filth of each morning. Then, one day Vicky brazenly made her way into the pen, 176 pounds of full-blooded woman surrounded by over a gluttonous ton of cumulative pork, only to slip in their shit and land––thank goodness her hands broke her fall––square into it. 

To say she shrieked would be a gross understatement. She was covered from head-to-toe in their decay, their flotsam. She bellowed out of the pigpen and to their outdoor shower, which she had never used. She was tempted to burn the leggings she had on but settled for simply throwing them in a 200G lawn bag. It was all cobwebs and dust in there, and it smelled heavily like long-since expired Miracle-Gro. She exited the shed naked and disgusted with the vile, sick creatures she’d granted sanctuary to in her once pristine backyard. The owls, her self-imposed guardians, stared at her mockingly, their single golden eyes glinting in the late morning sun. Basking in her nakedness she made a new vow to herself: the next undertaking would be grand. It would restore her backyard to its true majesty. 

She made her way inside to get clean, not merely hose off. The shower that followed was a fury. She brought her antibacterial hand soap in with her and scrubbed every crevice and fold of her body with rigor. She used her microdermabrasion on her face and clarifying shampoo, which she rinsed and repeated, before applying a deep conditioner. She scrubbed her nails with her husband’s nail brush, and her feet with a pumice stone she had received as a gift but never used. She was sitting on the shower bench, contorted like a Cirque du Soleil performer while at work on her left heel when her sixth sense kicked in–someone was at her house. Her suspicions were confirmed when the motion sensor on her alarm system pinged her phone on the bathroom countertop. 

She made a small trail of water on her way down to the office where their security cameras were on display on a small, flat screen. Despite the high-definition capabilities of what had once been her son’s computer screen, the resolution transmitted from each owl eye was pitifully grainy. Despite this, she was confident that Ben Cole was back and trespassing on their property, likely returning to rummage through their belongings in the carriage house under the guise of having left something behind. She ran back upstairs, nearly slipping on the water that had trailed behind her, and threw on her most regal poncho and some pants. She grabbed the can of bear mace they kept under the kitchen sink that Bill had bought a few years ago when their trash had been torn apart.

“Get out of my driveway!” she yelled. “Get off of my property! Who do you think you are, coming back here, you lousy, vapid, pot-smoking, lazy-eyed son of a bi-” She took the safety off of the can as she made her way down the driveway, then brandished it like a loaded pistol before she realized that it wasn’t Ben Cole at all. Staring at her, slack-jawed and speechless, was the oafish, plump frame of her excommunicated son, Garrett. “Mom!” he yelled, the tinge of familial affection in his voice was encompassed by fear. “Dad said it was okay. I just need to stay with y’all for a couple of weeks before I move out to Vail.”

She stopped about ten feet shy of him, with a white-knuckle grip on the mace. “Vail?” How had Bill failed to inform her that their son was moving to Colorado? Surely he had failed out of college again, unable to even pass business courses at a local community college.

“Yeah, Vail--I’m going to be managing the--” 

“I DON’T GIVE A SHIIIIIIT!” Her voice curdled with anger. She charged at him with her finger holding down the mace trigger.

“Mom? Mom! Oh, shit!” Garrett took off into the yard shortly with Vicky not far behind him. The trashcan had only ever been rummaged through the one time, no one in the family had ever used the bear mace, so the thick fog that plumed from the can came as quite a surprise. Vicky had assumed it would come out in a straight line, like normal mace. The cloud did not deter her. 

“Shit mom!” Garrett was stumbling and rubbing his eyes, “What the fuck is that?” He coughed.

“It’s bear mace,” she stammered, “you sack of shit!” Vicky’s eyes were burning too. It was beginning to get hard to breath. Her blind rage guided her.

She heard Garrett stumble. “Shit! Ow! Fuck!” 

The distinct squeal of panicked pigs followed his fall to the ground. 

She toppled over him blindly, then rolled off of him. He gave a long, pained groan. She shrieked in agony and clawed at the ground around her. She palmed the grounded electric net fencing in her hands. Powerless. Fallen. 

“YOU LET THE PIGS OUT!” She rolled back toward her son and started pummeling him with her fists. He blocked her as best he could before holding his forearms over his head in defense.

“YOU. BEAR. MACED. ME. MOM.” He continued to cough between small punches. Exhausted and burning in agony from the mace she rolled over again, withered in defeat. After what felt like an eternity, she heard Garrett heave himself up and trudge toward the house. But Vicky stayed where she was, her head in a cavity of thick, cold mud. She caked some on her face, anything for relief from the mace. She could hear the pigs squealing in the distance, undoubtedly digging up the grass in her front lawn. But then the sound of one drew closer. The mud slid down the sides of Vicky’s face toward her ears, and she wiped it off as best she could before slowly sitting up and squinting open her eyes. Her poncho congealed on the ground behind her. She made out the form of Aunt Hamilton standing before her in judgment. Aunt Hamilton, her prized sow. Aunt Hamilton with twelve swinging tits and a beard. Aunt Hamilton, a mother who didn’t care if her children were fat, or lazy, or gleefully wrecking a front yard with their noses. Aunt Hamilton wandered off, leaving Vicky thinking only of herself. How she wished Bill would come back to help clean her off, maybe make her a cosmo, and order in for the night. How she wished she could muster up the courage to apologize to her son, but she knew there was no use in that. It wasn’t her role. She was the battle-ax of the family, the stronghold. If she fell, the walls of her entire existence would crumble around her. 

She rose, ignoring the pain in her eyes and lungs, and pulled out her phone. She thumbed through her contacts until she found James Johnson, the farmer she had split the drove with. It rang twice before he answered.

“James, I need you to come pick up these pigs. Now.”