Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

It was nothing more than a few weeks’ worth of touching. The moon came out from your Mother Goose window and stared in shock. His finger didn’t even make it in all the way. Do you like this, your father asked. No, you answered. It took another five and a half weeks for him to get that through his head.

Ach du meine Güte! Heaven, hear me.

Your mother said she would leave him, take you and your brothers back to Germany. There was no way she could stay with a child molester. A monster.

Heaven, don’t stop hearing me!

But then weeks, more than a year passed.

When they entered his mother’s apartment on Hoyt Street, Bob set the suitcase down. The shower was running, and a woman’s voice sang the sweetest melody El had ever heard. The only way that we can survive, we need the Lord on our side!

Bob kissed El on her forehead and said, More of this later; he pointed to his lips. The woman in the shower called out to Bob to make his girl comfortable.

Bob took the salami out of the suitcase, holding it to the ceiling. You know, he said, we got food over here too. No need to drag this sucker clear across the world. This here salami is Italian food. What’s a German girl doing with Italian food?

El fell on the plastic slipcovered couch and rubbed her eyes. Her stomach growled. And she fell into a faint, a short deep sleep. No dreams whatsoever. Minutes later she woke up to Bob’s mother applying a cold washcloth to her face. What did you eat, baby? You bony as a bird.

El slowly raised herself and shook her head; she didn’t know enough English without her pocket dictionary to tell the woman that in fact the only thing she’d eaten all day was four gin and tonics. I got a pork chop in the icebox, his mother said. Let me go and heat it up, baby.

Bob turned away. But El could see the Army still left over in his bones and she felt his anger. Mama, he said. We don’t want that country food. Let me show my girl what we got to offer in Brooklyn!

And despite his mother’s protests, he lugged El back out in the car again; it was nearly 11. Her eyes were fully open as she rolled down the window. By now, her mother would probably be pulling her hair out, weeping with utter and relentless despair. That’s how El liked to imagine her: writhing in regret. Her mother had once denied knowing that the Jewish girls who came by after the war were starving. They looked fine to me, she’d said, giving all the crab apples to the horses. Bob pulled into a restaurant that had a window on its side and a sullen girl stuck in that window. Hello my name is Maryann and welcome to Jack in the Box and can I take your order? Bob grinned at the girl, then turned back to El; Dry your eyes, girl, he said. You making me look bad.

They ate in the car while listening to Ray Charles on the radio. When they got home, his mother greeted them at the door in a caftan gown. El had never seen anyone so smart, a woman who looked like a magazine. You will make my son very happy, Barbara said. She kissed El’s ears with lips that felt like firm pin cushions. Bob’s mother was thirty-six years old.

She served El a slice of sweet potato pie on a chipped plate with cornflowers around the edge and spread out a blanket on the couch. It’s not a fold-out but I hope you will be comfortable, she said. I don’t believe in young folks pretending marriage. It’s my church upbringing, but don’t even mention the word church to Bob! Do, and he’ll give you a mouthful.

She embraced her full-on, a mother’s hug. Bob’s told me only a little about you, so tomorrow I hope you’ll fill in all the blanks, Barbara said. And that was the very last thing El heard.

She felt herself lifted into the air. She felt herself descending into the ground. After so many years of no dreams, she was bombarded that night by pictures she hadn’t seen for ages. Cows, fires, birch trees, coins.

Dreams are nothing but random images, an elderly Polish doctor would tell her years later. This is how they do things in America.

They want to be nice to you, all these relatives at the reunion in Spring Hope. Cleopatra and Susie and Katrina and Shequanna and Betty. Horace and Clotilda and Tanya and Dove. They want to be nice, in spite of the way your eyes are your father’s eyes, your nose flat brown and wide as his. When you talk, even the younger cousins say they can hear Cousin Bobby’s voice come alive in yours. You know these kids have never met him, that they only know him from tall tales. Still, you laugh when they say that if he were to step foot on Grandma Elldine’s land, they would kill him with a hatchet.

They can’t imagine, these young cousins say, what it would be like to live in California and never see North Carolina again.

No, they will have to carry me out, one eight-year-old boy announces.

The sun is starting to set over the field. You breathe in this air: a hint of sulfuric chicken farm, a drying watering hole but evergreens as far as the nose can smell. A hint of thimbleweed out the corner of your eye.

You loom alone at the picnic tables like an unlit candle. The women and the uncles are discussing an evening service at the Baptist church. Ancient Hattie Mabel wonders if you’d like to come. It’s about time you learned the words to all the songs they sing.

But then, deus ex machina, Cousin Meggie comes running from her pickup. A giant cross plops between her breasts.

Sasha Jean, she cries. I been praying you wouldn’t forget me!

She is as round as the proverbial barrel, and yet she moves storklike from the truck between the fading aunts and uncles. You’ve thought about her for years but haven’t picked up a pen or tapped on a keyboard. What would those hicks have to say to you? your father once asked. What would they have to say to anybody?

You stopped seeing him, despite his letters, his infrequent calls to your college dorm, your first apartment in Manhattan, your sublet in the Bronx. When you turned eighteen, you announced you were never going to see him again, and he laughed. Sasha, he said. People make mistakes. People get over things. It’s the course of life. Grudges are about as real as cotton candy.

But you kept true to your word. Years passed—and then you received notice that he’d died in his sleep. Next to Faith Akintola. In front of her favorite show: Luke and Laura, escaping on foot over the top of a jetliner. In the middle of the ocean. During a lunar eclipse.

Meggie squashes you with treacly hugs, doesn’t wait for any answers before immediately asking after your mom. Her skin is as light as a white person’s; her eyes, round and small (Mongoloid, your father once said), literally sparkle as she talks. She says your mom’s name, and her face is quickly awash in tears—she apologizes for not sending any kind of note when she heard of your mother’s death. Victuals always heal a broken heart, she says, leading you to the table with the hot sauce steak and loading another plate high. Crispy kale and artichoke hearts. You want to tell Meggie that now you officially belong to her, to them—what use is a girl without a parent to stake her in the landscape? But she is eyeing you up and down; too skinny, she concludes. Your mama would not be happy.

When you shake your head, Meggie frowns. Your mama was the best thing that ever happened to this earth, she says, waving over Aunt Quincy and her bowl of spicy pork barbecue.

El awoke the next Brooklyn morning not on the sofa but on a huge double bed. Striped sheets had crumpled under her armpits; a thin blanket straggled at her feet. El felt a terrible, lovely ache in her shoulders, in between her legs. Music sounded from the kitchen, from a radio on the table; later in the day someone would say, You mean you never heard gospel music before? Lord Have Mercy!