Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

Evie goes in the back and brings out a soup tureen. This is my personal favorite, she announces happily. Her lips, your mother notices, are the color of strawberries.

For those women not afraid to spend a little more on themselves, Evie adds, a bit louder; perhaps she has noticed your mother’s thick accent.

The trip to Fortunoff is a major departure. You both were supposed to go to the Fruit Tree, and then to White’s for some tube socks, and then to the doctor, the one who will tell your mother that IUDs don’t normally fail, and if she is in the family way, it is due to her own recklessness. Then on to the butcher for lamb chops, and finally to the dentist, where she would have that impacted wisdom tooth looked at.

So much to do.

But early this morning, when the dawn was sparkling with a few lights over Pomegranate treetops, something possessed your mother. She waited. She called Miss Jerldean and asked her to pick the boys up from school later—Johann from the first grade, little Keith from kindergarten; she pulled you from your bed and tossed you into the backseat; she drove at the speed limit to Westbury, where Fortunoff loomed like a Long Island Everest.

You’ve always wanted to come here. You’ve always wanted to go with your mother. But it would take until now, the day after you told your mother. In the store she doubles over the counter and begins to cry. To you she whispers that the word finger literally crushed her spine.

Ma’am, are you OK? Evie asks.

Utter exasperation. Your mother replies she’s fine, all the while caressing the bottom of the dark blue salad bowl on the counter. It isn’t the blue onion, but rather a blue fleur-de-lis. It is a pattern she is gradually and quickly falling in love with. The small bowl has a rounded bottom and soft, wavering edges. You touch your mother’s hand with your own.

Sorry, ma’am, you can’t just buy one piece. It comes in a five-piece place setting. Tureen, large cake platter, medium cake platter, teapot, coffee pot, creamer, sugar additional.

You look up and see the impatience in Evie’s eyes.

And can hear your mother’s thoughts, loud and clear, funneled into your own head, the small bowl in her hands: how wonderful it would be to run away, with just the girl. To come back in a few weeks for the other kids. But just have this girl, all to myself. To hear what the world has been saying all along.

The bowl is hard as a rock.

Your mother purchases an entire dinner service of the unnamed pattern, twenty pieces in all, but says she’ll have to come back at a later date for the soup tureen and cake platter. She is, after all, not made out of money.

With the first light of her first morning in America, El felt the wind blowing in from the open window. A train clanged by, as if the track were close by. Bob, she called out again.

She found her suitcase in the front room of the apartment, right where Bob had dropped it, and she immediately went for the lock she’d snapped shut after tossing the cufflinks back inside.

The tea and coffee pots were fine, maybe a tiny chip on the edge of one lid. The platter was broken in three places. With glue, it could be restored. A bit of glue and some sun, some fresh New York air. The skyline, the taxis, the restaurants, the department stores. Gin and tonic flowing like a gulfstream toward Jamaica Bay, and from there out to the beckoning Atlantic.

She laid the Melitta dishes—blue pansies etched on a white background—back into the suitcase and went into the kitchen. The radio played soft and loud at the same time. Outside this window, which was covered with an eyelet curtain, a woman and child walked by, laughing.

El’s hands felt damp. She smelled like Bob’s hair, his chest. Surely there was a tea kettle somewhere in this kitchen. Above the stove a small plaque bearing the face of a black man read: I’VE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP.

She would have to shower, she would have to wash her hair.

The swim was more delicious than food; afterward, you all rest on your backs on the slick bluestone shore, you and Monique and Kate (high as kites off some pills they borrowed from Stanley) and Meggie, who can’t seem to stop crying. Her face has gone back to childhood, with its circles of ringworm and eye dirt. She says she will never get over the day your mother saved her life.

Once, she says, there was a family all living on top of each other in a double-wide but still there was no room. We ate Cap’n Crunch every day and felt hungry all the time. Then this lady appeared out of a cream-colored DeVille. She was wearing a blue scarf on her head, like a turban, and she smelled of lilacs.

Little girl, she said to me. Don’t make such a sad face.

She lifted me into her arms, and I could smell baby roses over those lilacs. The powder blue ones, the kinds with the thorns that don’t make any difference.

Little girl, she said, Would you like to come live with me?

And I was all set to drift asleep, let this fine lady take me with her, away from the smell of unwashed cereal bowls and all the feet of my brothers.

She was better than a fairy godmother. She was cleaner than a queen. There was a pot of summer rhubarb boiling somewhere. And just like that, I recall my mama having words with her. Saying some nonsense about how her daughter was not some African orphan in the desert.

The truth was, I would’ve gone to any desert.

My mama lived twenty years after that day. You know what happened to me. On her last day at Auntsville Rehabilitation, where she was fidgeting with her kidneys, she told me I looked like a million bucks. How was it I raised such a gorgeous gal, she asked. Her lips were like quarry silt.

You did such a good job, I told her. I didn’t want to bring up the cream DeVille. I didn’t want to talk about that blue scarf or the queen walking into every house like she owned it. I was afraid of seeing the last drop of my mama evaporate on the spot.

Quit that bellyaching, Monique says, laughing. We all been there. We never look back, dummy.

What you need is a baby, says Kate, who is the only one—besides you—who is childless. She adds, A baby to love in the right way.

Monique swats her cheek gently and says, Lucky for us, there will never be a shortage of kids. Take your pick you want another one. Myself, I got three I’d love to give you. And I think Sasha Jean about ready to tell us of the newest addition, isn’t that right?

No one waits for an answer: instead, they laugh faintly and remove their wet shirts and shorts. They are becoming mermaids, and for some reason, you can’t stand to watch. Is it ever too late? Would swimming be better than a life of feathers? You know you’re no different from the rest—so you get up and dive back into the hole, letting its blackness swallow you. Too late: at water’s touch, your arms become fins and your legs fuse together. Your belly feels cold as you plow through the underground ripples; your neck has grown bright brown scales. The others don’t seem to notice. But moments later, they call out to you, and then dive in themselves.

Do they change? You can’t really tell. Eventually, you all swim, however, with the same ease, the same ruffled glide, to a mangrove tree, the roots of which sit like umbrella handles above the water. When you come up for air, you all look strangely bloodless. Tell us, Monique finally says, resting one arm on a root, What would you say, Sasha Jean, to some extra cash?

When you raise your eyebrows, she says, I plan to empty out the uncles’ payday accounts tomorrow. I figured out a computer way.

Please don’t name me accomplice after the fact, Kate says, swooping over to kiss Monique on the lips. Meggie blushes.