“Don’t hang up on me, Emily.”
“Why are you calling, Roger?”
Remember, the judge ruling on our divorce recommended we employ a mediator to determine how we’ll divide everything rather than hiring more lawyers.”
“How do we divide the furniture, cut them in half? How do you split the bed, the one we slept in and fucked in for five years?”
“This is not the way to resolve this. Neither of us can afford more legal fees. The judge gave me the names of three mediators, and I checked out all of them. Bernard Holbright is the best choice. He’s a well-recommended, retired judge. I took the liberty of setting up an appointment for next Wednesday.”
She snickered. “You took a lot of liberties with our marriage.”…
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Surrounded by lavish mansions, the old beach cottage looks small, forlorn and utterly out of place on its water-front lot. A red estate sale sign is the only color in the withered front yard. A middle-aged woman sits on a bench in the entryway holding a wad of cash in one hand, her cellphone in the other. Lost in conversation, she smiles as I walk by on the sidewalk and waves me toward the front door.
It is mid-February and I’ve just escaped an Idaho winter for a short trip to Coronado Island, my Southern California home more than fifty years ago. The sun is bright and warm, the soft breeze fragrant with flowers and fresh-cut grass. During my morning stroll, I’m revisiting the neighborhood on the bay side of the island, near the navy base. …
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Upon release from the Army, Vernon was assigned to work as a custodian. The quiet ex-sniper with ivory skin and translucent, mint green eyes kept writing to Matias, the decorated solider with whom he had a love affair. Matias never replied.
Vernon mopped the floor of a bar on downtown’s outer edge where a raucous band played twice a week. He cleaned and wiped counters after liquor spilled from broken bottles and shattered glass. Wearing a faded gray uniform, he cleaned after patrons fought, bled and collapsed, motivating himself by imagining Matias walking in. After a few weeks, a gathering of gay men noticed Vernon. Clearing empty cans one night, he heard a voice. “You there, hunny,” one of the men called as he collected trash, “come over here.”…
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Gabe was standing beneath a light, misty drizzle, checking on his little bit of garden—the flowerpots on the second-floor balcony. Playing through his head was a snippet of Sibelius he’d been listening to, over and over, the day before while he was trying to get his grading done. But he didn’t know the whole piece by heart—far from it— so mostly the same bit was repeating, over and over.
The melody was in the horn section. There was something so lonely about a French horn. Composers almost always grouped their horns by four or eight. And yet they still sounded lonely. Like a group of lonely people who had gathered together… to be lonely together.
He kneeled down to see that one of the cups he had set out to catch rainwater had a cricket in it.…
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The woman did not cry when her husband told her he was leaving.
No. She was a woman with a hard mother––a good mother––one who taught her to never become a wretch. A hard mother who taught her that men had hearts, but they were different from women’s; they were colder, and better for shaping, like biscuit dough. She showed the woman, then a girl, how to hold the dough, how to warm it enough to bend but not enough to stick, and then she showed the girl the wretches, the abandoned women, the ghoulish, vacant wanderers. She showed her them as a warning to never join them.
Her husband told her at the table, stone-faced and flinty-eyed. The one she’d bought after they first married, stumbling around a furniture store drunk on love and hope.…
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People no longer smell sulfur when they see me. A papaya vendor at Hangman’s Market takes a sudden interest in the depths of a coin purse. A bank clerk’s posture stiffens with dignity and fear. A young man seizes me up and dismisses me as a possible competitor for any female he would seek to bed.
As a result, in my dotage, I’ve permitted myself to become a man of habit. Hangman’s Market each weekday at 11, where I load my string bag like all the market-goers–papaya, yams, some dried sausage. A daily glass of tafia before lunch at Don Pedro’s by the sea. A crossword puzzle I make no real effort to complete. The siesta afterward, while my housekeeper cooks my evening meal without supervision, since she’s the only person who can be trusted, and even then, I make her taste dinner first.…
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The trees with branches thick and coarse, barely move when children swing from them.
Those trees have strong, deep roots that won’t let a child fall.
Such trees have branches that can hold the weight of an argument over who did the dishes last.
Such trees can stand to have the very bark torn from their bodies over screams of ‘I hate you’ and ‘just leave me alone.’ Such trees know how to bounce back and start a fresh the next day.
Trees like that, solid and unmoving, can handle weather changes—cold stares and burning tension.
Trees with roots that cannot be ripped from the ground are able to handle the heat of a good old fiery career change.
But there are trees that haven’t grown to be so resilient.…
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