Lynn Strong - Hold Still

She stops then and looks at Ellie. She puts the top on the pot with the rice and pulls a chair out so Ellie can sit. The kitchen’s large, with bright yellow cabinets above burnt-red counters covering two full walls. They have an island in the middle with a stovetop and lines of spices. The kitchen opens straight onto the living room, where two long couches sit catty-corner to one another and look out lines of windows onto the overly lush yard and then the river beyond that. “You think you’re not that caught up in your idea of yourself as woman, you know? But it turned out I wasn’t above that sort of empty ache.” For a minute she’s quiet, turning down the rice, looking at Jeff. “It was the third time we tried that it finally stuck.” Jeffrey sits at the table close to Ellie. He has a magazine in front of him, an old New Yorker. He flips pages as Annie talks.

“I guess I’ll always be most grateful for that push,” Annie continues, and Ellie watches as she smiles at her husband, his eyes still angled toward the pages of the magazine. “And I have him now.” There’s a way that the “him” sounds that makes clear to all of them that she means Jack. “It’s hard to imagine there was a time when I might not have. I never thought I’d be living here either or running that restaurant.” She says the last word like it tastes sour, raises an eyebrow, firms her lips. “But it suits me. And I like the water.”

“Me too,” says Jeffrey. He stands up now and grabs a green pepper from the pan where Annie’s mixing them together with the garlic and large strips of onion. He kisses Annie once, brusquely, on the cheek. “All of it.” He winks at Ellie. “Me too.”

Annie goes to check on Jack as they sit down to dinner. Jeffrey offers Ellie wine as she settles in her chair. She almost says no, but he’s already reaching up into the cupboard for another wine glass as he asks. Ellie doesn’t want to be the sort of girl who can’t handle a glass of wine when it’s offered her. She likes the face that Jeffrey makes when she says sure and smiles. He’s tall and tan and only looks his age when his skin crinkles on his forehead and around his eyes as he smiles, which he does, his head tilted toward Ellie, as he fills her glass. When Annie comes back she looks at Ellie’s glass, then over at Jeffrey, but whatever thought she has she keeps to herself.

She must not know, Ellie thinks. Or what she does know isn’t all there is.

Ellie loves the feel of the glass’s stem between her fingers, the way the weight of the wine shifts subtly as she tips it to her lips. She drinks slowly so as not to have to pour herself another glass.

Annie tells her a bit about the restaurant. Things are slow now because it’s summer. Like so much else in Florida, Jeffrey says, the tourist seasons are backward too. The whole place empties out from May to September. It gets too hot and the snowbirds head up north. So she’ll have time to get to know Jack gradually. Jeffrey’s schedule is also slower, since he works with kids and many of them have also gone for the too-hot months.

They eat quickly and move to the couches in the living room. The couches are a dark blue and the cushions are hard when Ellie sits. She pulls her legs underneath her in the corner. She wonders briefly if she should have asked first, if she should put her feet back on the floor. But, quickly, Annie does the same as Ellie; she rests her feet up underneath her, then stretches them out on Jeffrey’s lap; Ellie settles in as Annie talks.

“You know, he was the prom king.”

Jeffrey has one arm around the back of the couch and the fingers of his other hand move slowly up and down Annie’s bare shin.

“And she was Daria,” Jeffrey says. He’d spoken hardly at all during dinner and Ellie’s startled a minute by the sound of him.

She looks at them blankly. She doesn’t know who Daria is.

“Oh, god,” says Jeffrey. He holds tight to Annie’s ankle, face formed to pretend-terror. He hasn’t looked directly at Ellie since he poured her wine. “We’re really old.”

Annie shakes her head at him and swats his hand away. “It was this show,” she says. “On MTV.”

“You know MTV, right?” asks Jeffrey.

Ellie nods. She takes one small sip of wine and doesn’t swallow right away.

“She hated everyone,” he says.

Annie hits him again, pulls her legs off of his lap, and pulls them underneath her. “I wasn’t that bad.”

“She was one of those girls who wore a lot of black and scowled at people.” Jeffrey furrows his brow, first at Annie, then just shy of Ellie’s ear.

“You make me sound awful,” Annie says.

They both laugh, and Ellie envies this: the playful closeness, the story that’s been told so many times.

“Your mom was her only friend.”

Ellie stiffens at the mention of her mother. She reaches for her wine and takes too big a sip.

“Also true,” Annie says.

“Did you guys know each other then?” Ellie asks. She wants to keep the story just on them.

“Definitely no,” Annie says.

“She’s much older,” says Jeffrey.

“Screw you,” Annie says to Jeffrey, then turns to Ellie. “Two years.”

“But she’s also a genius,” he says. “So she was four years ahead of me in school.”

“Geniuses don’t run fried fish restaurants.”

Jeffrey shrugs.

“I would have hated him,” Annie says.

Jeffrey laughs, swatting Annie’s ankle. “Right back at you, kid,” he says.

Ellie pulls the blanket folded over the couch back and spreads it across herself. She stares out the window, rustling trees, takes two small sips of wine.

“Your mom saved me, though,” says Annie. “I was this sad and angry little ball of nerves.”

“Feral,” inserts Jeffrey.

Annie ignores him, eyes on Ellie. “She took me in,” she says.

“You know. She’s not so good with boundaries, your mom.” Annie smiles toward her feet. “She was so young then. At first you forgot how young she was because she was so smart. And she could talk, you know? Even then. She had no training and she was pretty clearly just making it up. But she talked and talked and at some point you realized what she was saying might be worth something. She wore flip-flops to class and she’d sneak out to run on the beach during her off periods. I had her in the afternoon and there were usually specks of sand on her feet by the time she taught our class.”

Ellie can almost imagine all of this, but still, it’s impossible for her to see it fully in her head. Her mom is so completely the person she’s been Ellie’s whole life.

“I was reckless. You know? I was sixteen. I had no idea what all of it was for. I went to school because I was supposed to. My parents’ line was always, we go to work, so you go to school. That’s an awful way to sell it. I skipped a ton of class. I drove around a lot and listened to the same awful music over and over. I’d drive six hours down to Key West, go swimming, and drive back.”

“She had a convertible then too,” says Jeffrey. “It’s always more fun to be the tortured depressed teenager when your parents are rich.”

Annie doesn’t look at him. He gets up and pours himself a glass of wine. He brings the bottle from the kitchen into the living room and is already refilling Ellie’s glass, not looking at Annie, before either of them can tell him no.

Annie eyes her husband. Then fixes her gaze on Ellie. “Your mom listened to me. All I really wanted was to talk , you know? To cry to someone without them telling me I was sick.” She reaches behind the couch and pulls a throw out of the basket filled with blankets. It’s still over eighty late at night, but Jeffrey keeps the air conditioner at sixty-two. Annie wraps the throw around herself and burrows back into the corner of the couch, not touching Jeffrey. She could be Ellie’s mom in that moment, folding in on herself.