Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

“I didn’t even know you could do that,” he said.

I explained to him about capons and how they would behave more or less like the hens, and he nodded with approval. He looked at his boys and asked, “What do you kids think of that?”

“It’s cool,” said Mark. “There’s blood.”

“Blood and balls,” said Matthew. “Except they don’t look like balls. More like little bitty lima beans.”

Dodge shook his head. “I’ll be damned. Lived on a farm all my life and I never seen that. Not once.”

I smiled, in spite of the gory scene in front of me. I wasn’t afraid of Dodge, exactly, but nobody wants to get on the wrong side of someone who wants to go to war over a broken dishwasher. Elias stayed quiet now during Dodge’s dinnertime rants, but sometimes he would pause in midmeal, his fork forgotten in his hand, and look at Dodge with a steady, unblinking glare that, in a more magical land than this one, would have reduced his brother-in-law to ash.

At dinner that night, Dodge regaled the family with the story of the day’s rooster surgery. “Now, there’s a woman who can do everything,” Dodge declared, and I glanced up uneasily at the unexpected praise. “Can use hand tools and power tools, knows how to split a log and neuter a rooster, and can still cook a decent meal. She’s got you outclassed and outgunned, Cade. I bet she can shoot worth a damn, too.”

“If I’m in the right mood,” I conceded. Dave always claimed there were bears in the woods around Southridge and had made sure every member of his staff could hit a target with both handgun and rifle. I had never seen a bear or any sign of one around the place, but I was pretty confident I could shoot one if it ever proved true.

“See, she’s one up on you,” Dodge told Cade.

“I know how to shoot a gun,” Cade argued. “Dad taught me when I was Matthew’s age. I just don’t want to hang out in the woods with you and your compadres, shooting up beer cans.”

“You should come along one day anyhow. Spend some time outdoors. You’re lookin’ pretty pale these days. Getting that desk-jockey look about you.”

Cade scowled at Dodge across the table, and I knew he had hit a nerve. Back in Maryland Cade had run at least five miles every morning, but here the farm chores left no time for that before work, and in the evenings he was too tired. He couldn’t go tanning here either, and made self-conscious remarks to me about his increasingly wintry complexion. A few days before, I’d caught him looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, peeling down the waistband of his boxers to check for contrast, then rubbing his stomach as if to reassure himself it was still flat.

“Jill, you can come out, too,” Dodge said magnanimously, in a tone that made me suspect I was the first female he had ever invited into the boys’ club. “The two of you can compete. Make whatever bets amongst yourselves, like a good husband and wife.”

Candy giggled. Cade looked at me and rolled his eyes. In spite of my distaste for Dodge, the idea sounded like fun. It would be something to do at least, an interesting break from the monotony of our day-to-day routine. It might be good for Cade, too, to get his head back into the kinds of things people did up here instead of all the things he felt he was missing. I smiled and said, “Sure, I’m up for it. Why not?”

He narrowed his eyes at me before focusing down on his plate, stabbing at his potatoes as if it was personal.

“He needs to just relax and take a breather,” said Leela, wrapping a barn star in bubble wrap and slipping it into a shipping box. “Dodge has some funny ideas about things, and goodness knows that shouldn’t be any shock to Cade. And he’s always got to get all worked up anyhow.”

We were standing in Leela’s attic workroom, me with the roll of bubble wrap and a pair of scissors, Leela with the priority mail packing labels and boxes and a pen. On the desk the laptop was open to the eBay screen so Leela could get addresses, and indeed it did have a slip of electrical tape over the webcam’s camera lens. I cut off another length of wrap and rolled it around a star as she addressed the label in her spidery handwriting.

“You wouldn’t think they would dislike each other so much,” she went on, her voice a little distracted, “Dodge and Cade, two of a kind as they are. Both of them are men of strong opinions. Both have the stubborn idea that anyone who doesn’t agree with them must just be flat stupid. And their opinions aren’t so different, but I suppose it’s enough that each thinks the other is a dummy. Of course, Cade’s only twenty-one. He’s got lots of growing left to do. Dodge, I don’t know what his excuse is.”

“Maybe that he never expanded his horizons.”

“Maybe. It does a body good to get out and see the world. Elias sure is better off for it. Did you see what he brought me back?”

I shook my head, trying to make sense of her idea that Elias was better off. She patted a piece of tape onto the box, then walked over to a cabinet and pulled out a small rolled rug. Letting it unfurl to the ground with a flourish, she said, “It’s a real Muslim prayer mat. They kneel down on it and do that thing, bowing toward Mecca and all that business.”

“That’s pretty neat.”

She smiled. The delicate metal hooks of her bridgework showed. “Bet you it’s the only one in Frasier. I thought it was a bathroom rug when he first gave it to me. Wonder what the Muslims would think of that , if I’d put it out for people to drip-dry on.”

I grinned back, and she rolled up the mat and put it away. “Cade seems excited about the baby coming,” she said. “He’s going to be a good daddy. You don’t know, Jill, what a lucky thing that is to see a man who cares about all that. Eddy, God bless him, he hardly paid our kids any mind until they were walking and talking. Cade’ll be different, I can tell.”

I nodded, thinking back to the night before, when Cade had rested his palm against one side of my belly and his ear against the other as if trying to pull the baby closer. Sometimes I just wish I could hear its heartbeat , he had said. I know it’s there and all, but sometimes I just want to hear it . I told him I wished I knew whether it was a girl or a boy, and he’d shaken his head. I wouldn’t want to find out, even if I could. The anticipation is better than knowing.

“I was always terrified of being a single mom,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to have to struggle like my mother did. And if I couldn’t do as good a job, I knew I’d never be able to forgive myself.”

Her smile was tight as she peeled a label and smoothed it onto a finished package. “But that’s all mothering is. Whatever your own parents got wrong, you absolutely will not do, and whatever they got right, you’d darned well better get right, as well. That’s the disadvantage to those of us who had good mothers. We spend our whole lives trying to match them and can’t ever quite shake the feeling that we’re falling short.”

My voice was teasing. “Maybe it’s better to have a bad mother, then. Gives you higher self-esteem in the long run.”

“Maybe it’s better to know that your children love you regardless,” she said. “They don’t care how your mother was. They just want their own.”

I thought about that. During my first summer at Southridge, all the kids in the Alateen group had gathered around the campfire and told stories about their families. In the typical manner of girls my age I’d started to butt heads with my mother; her mere presence embarrassed me, her nagging about my room and my grades threw me into explosive tantrums and I looked forward to the chance to vent about my life at home. But I never got the chance, because the stories that made their way around the circle alarmed me into silence—tales of parents in denial, parents who couldn’t stay sober, or flew into rages, or passed out on the floor in puddles of their own bodily fluids. I understood then why my mother had sent me there, and my heart ached for the kids whose lives had become the collateral damage of their parents’ addictions. But it was true—they loved them even so. Admiration and love, I learned, are two entirely separate things.