Poetry and Prose from the Center for Writers
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* WINNER, FICTION *
Even Caves Grow
by JENNIFER BREWINGTON
The way I learned to love is impossible, backwards in a circle, and upside down. Chase what’s leaving you and run from what’s chasing you, something my mother said. The things our parents told us. What were they thinking? Maybe she never said that at all but it was what she did, and I turned it into words. She moved to Arizona a few months ago to marry a sheriff named Al she met on the internet, and that’s something close to chasing though she says she’s always wanted to live in the west. All I know about Al is his first wife died, I’m not sure of what, and so they bonded over dead spouses in a chat room a year before my father was dead. And then when he was, she was gone.
They were divorced for fifteen years before he died, and I suppose it could be considered a good reason to move to Arizona to marry Al, but I hate the way she used to say “your father” and then when he got sick she said “my husband” and then when he died she said “my love.” She’s a defense attorney, and he’s a sheriff, something she finds adorable and made jokes about when she told me she was leaving. She never calls me “my” anything. Once when she was drunk, she told me she never loved me as much as much as my dad. I don’t think it’s such a bad thing, really, to love your husband more than your child, but it was at the funeral, so it seemed a bit ill-timed. She wasn’t trying to be cruel, she was trying to tell me her love story, but she was drunk on vodka and Al wasn’t able to make it from Arizona. I couldn’t believe she invited him in the first place. I’d have punched him for being alive. Not everyone has to love their mother. It’s silly to think so.
I’m looking out of the passenger side of my uncle’s red pickup truck, window rolled down, on the way home from the memorial service held after the funeral of my father. It’s been raining and the air outside is cold. Tim likes country music, the new kind not the good kind, so the wind makes it more tolerable. I don’t understand why people eat after a funeral. I’ve never seen so many casseroles, and I never want to see so many again. Three people brought tuna casserole. Why would anyone eat cheese on tuna? Why would anyone eat tuna?
“What are you thinking about?” my uncle, Tim, asks.
“Nothing and tuna. My mind keeps jumping from one thing to another. Before that I was thinking about my mother.”
Tim’s been quiet all day. This is the most he’s said to anyone, and I think it’s because I’m his brother’s daughter, and he needs to worry about me. “Do you miss her?”
“I miss someone,” I say. “I’m not sure it’s her anymore. Thanks for driving me. I’ll put the car in the shop tomorrow. Can you give me a lift to work?”
“Nobody expects you to go to work tomorrow,” he says.
“What else am I going to do?”
“Take a few days,” he says.
“A few days? What happens in a few days?”
“I don’t know. It’s what we do. We take a few days. Grieve.”
“I want to go to work,” I say. “It’s almost a relief, you know? It’s been a shitty year.”
“It sure has,” he says and he tears up thinking about his dead brother or how everything matters so much that nothing does. I don’t know what he’s crying about, but that’s what I’d be crying about, if I were crying. But I’m not. I haven’t figured out how yet, but I feel it brewing inside me. I’m not looking forward to any of what’s to come.
I loved my father; my father is dead. An impossible concept. Do we love in concepts or language? Oh that’s not how it goes. It’s think. Do we think in concepts or language? He asked me once and I answered language and he told me to prove it and then fell asleep, and I was never able to prove it. Now he was a concept. He once took five months to solve a math problem, and when he did it, he couldn’t remember my birthday. He’d filled a yellow legal pad full of numbers and mathematical symbols. In the top upper corner of one of the pages, my mother’s name written in cursive by pencil, Abigail, smudged from when he rubbed his thumb over it or did I rub my thumb over it the first time I saw it?
I’m tired, maybe I’m lonely, but then I’m always lonely. I can’t think of a time I wasn’t. Maybe one. Where is Brad? Somewhere in Texas, a greedy state, all of that space. Don’t you have enough, Texas? So many stars and you never look up.
“I have to go to work if I want a new car,” I say. “Mine is on its last wheel.”
Uncle Tim laughs not because it’s a funny joke, but he someone has to laugh at my dumb jokes. He says, “Maybe you can look into that when the money comes in. Should have enough to help you get back on your feet.”
“Like horses,” I say.
“What about horses?”
“How you have to get horses on their feet,” I say.
He has two horses, Charlie and Annabelle, and he’s probably the one who told me that in the first place. “I’m going to call your boss tomorrow. You need some sleep.”
“Oh god, please don’t. I’m not fourteen missing school. I mean, this is my job. I’ll call in.”
“Okay, but you have to promise me you’ll call in.”
“I will. It’s not a big deal, though. I like my job. It would be nice to go.” I work at the city’s natural science museum creating displays or I worked there until two weeks ago when I was laid off for missing too many days of work which, I found out, was ten. I haven’t told Tim.
*
The guy I’m seeing, Brad, works the pipelines in Texas and travels back and forth once a month or so depending on the schedule. He keeps his home here, even though he spends more time in Texas. He never got used to the idea of actually moving there. It’s starting to weigh on him, all the travel, but it’s good money, and if he keeps at it for one more year, he’ll have enough savings to do what he wants which goes back and forth between doing “Nothing all over the world,” and buying some property in the mountains. He’s got this idea about mountains. It’s the same one my dad had about casinos.
I’ve been spending more time at Brad’s place lately, and I’ve started wanting things I don’t want like two toothbrushes by the sink, a dog named Buckley, co-adopted from the local shelter. I want to split the cable bill and argue over the placement of lawn furniture. Awful, awful things. Fuck if this isn’t love.
He doesn’t get bogged down the way I do and that’s as good of an explanation as any for why we work. We do work, right? This is us working? I have nothing by way of comparison to know for sure. I’ve been saying things like, “Tell me about your ex-wife,” and that’s how I know it’s a good idea to gather the guns and the grain. Be ready to make an exit, lickety split. I’ve already imagined Buckley as a German Shepherd.
Brad is working on his computer, and I’m in his way, so I pace around the house. I return a call from my friend, Doug, who moved to Seattle to pursue his dreams of not living in Mississippi. He doesn’t answer. I leave a voicemail, “Hey, it’s Punk,” I say.
Brad finds the Punk thing hilarious. He says Punk this and Punk that and “When—ever in your whole life—have you ever been a punk ever? Ever?”
“It’s a name I picked up. Come on. Don’t you have a nickname?” I ask.
“Plenty,” he says.
“Rachel Magee called me Punk from the sixth grade through senior year. I have no idea where or why it started or what it meant, but my friends picked it up too. As a way, I guess, of countering her. She told everyone I’d had sex with Slow Billy, this kid who was, I don’t know, kind of weird.”
“Did you have sex with Slow Billy?”
“That wasn’t the point of the story,” I say.
“In the sixth grade,” and I see him doing the math.
I see him doing the math. “Stop doing the math.”
He laughs so hard there’s no sound. “You had sex in the sixth grade,” he says. “Damn, Puckett,” he calls me by my last name like I’m his bro, a dude, a guy on his basketball team. “Sixth grade,” he repeats. Why did I tell that story?
*
Tim drops me off in front of the museum for the fifth day in a row. This time he watches me like a parent dropping off their kid at school. I think he’s on to me. It’s a dumb trick. Something I’ve seen in movies that seems smarter in movies. I go inside. The building is one of the nicest in the city. The outside is painted blue and green, and there’s a giant globe sculpture in front. The sculpture is proportioned correctly, and I used to spend hours staring at it. Inside I avoid looking around, because I don’t want anyone to recognize me, but I’m too curious to walk back out. I go to the area in the reptile collection, because it’s dark and there’s always a voice booming from the sound system explaining things about the beginning and end of time, better than church. I can tell they’ve hired someone else to take over the displays, because everything is rearranged. The petrified dinosaur eggs are in the same display area as the live turtles. They’re not the same thing.
When I was sixteen, my father moved to Japan to teach English. When I was twenty-six, he moved back home to die in his hometown of Biloxi. He was not a stranger to grand gestures, in his own quiet way. Over those years, he sent me things shaped like whales: a small sculpture carved in wood, several drawings, a lamp. All kinds of things. He had this idea I liked whales, but I didn’t really know much about whales. Now I do, though, because my father sent me all of these whales. Whales sleep with one half of their brain at a time. I wouldn’t have known that had it not been for the misunderstanding between my father and I about my affections for whales. And if it weren’t for the whales, I wouldn’t have applied for this job with the turtles and the dinosaur eggs. I really love my job. Loved. Everything is in the past. I keep forgetting.
I never said I didn’t love my mother. I said I wasn’t obligated.
*
It’s been a few months since the funeral, and I couldn’t afford my old place without the job, so I’ve been staying with my uncle and his wife, Amanda. Tim is my dad’s little brother. We’re only six years apart, so we were thrown together a lot growing up. He was the youngest of his family by fourteen years—the child of a second, late marriage. Since I was an only child, and my dad loved his little brother, we grew up more like siblings with all the love and hate of it.
The kitchen smells like bacon. I’m standing by the table with my keys in my hand trying to get out of there, and he’s sitting at the bar eating a bowl of cereal even though it’s four in the afternoon. The kitchen is spotless, except for the pan on the stove used for the bacon, but I don’t see the bacon. “Where’s the bacon?” I ask.
“I ate the bacon,” he says. “I might make more. Want some?”
“I’m good,” I say. A red, glass vase of fresh flowers sits in the center of the counter—gardenias and hydrangea the color of the sky. They look like they came from the garden, but there is no garden. Amanda pays extra for that.
“You need to go ahead and deposit that check,” he says. He’s referring to what’s left of my dad’s estate which is five thousand dollars. It was supposed to be more like twenty-five, but my dad kept hidden the actual extent of his debts. He did a lot of gambling once he found out he was sick, and I don’t blame him. He also took a trip to Hawaii where he married a twenty-four year old for less hours than her age. It was annulled. When I asked him why Hawaii, he said, “Because it’s Hawaii.” In the two years before he died, in and out of the hospital, he told me the story of his brief marriage over and over and how he couldn’t go through with it because she would have gotten everything when he died. Every time, I felt I had to thank him. Everything comes down to this estate. Estate. What a thing to call five thousand dollars.
“I’m on my way to a job interview. I won’t have time to go by the bank. I’ll do it tomorrow,” I tell him. The interview is with a law firm to be an assistant of some kind. Tim made me set it up when he found out about the job. He went by to pick me up after work, and they told him. Bastards. Never trust people who work for the city.
I’m not sure if it’s the grey in his beard; he looks older, more serious. Tim doesn’t usually keep a beard. I wish he didn’t look so much like my dad or maybe I wish he looked more like him. Maybe I wish everyone looked more like my dad. “The beard looks nice.”
He shakes his head, scratches his beard. “You don’t think the beard makes me look old?”
“Older,” I say. “More sophisticated.”
Amanda walks in on her tiptoes like she’s floating and says, “Hello,” but she doesn’t look my way. She has a strong frame, red hair, blue eyes, elegant. She doesn’t trust me or expect anything in the way of action, so I can relax around her.
“You could go back to college,” he suggests. He sounds like how my doctor sounded after a pregnancy scare when she mistook my panic for lack of knowledge. “You can take birth control pills,” she’d said just like he’s saying this now.
“With five thousand dollars? I could go back for maybe a day,” I say.
“You could apply for scholarships and grants too. I’m saying it would be a start.” He presents other options: move to Montana and work at a National Park, because this is something I told him I wanted to do right after I dropped out of college. He has big ideas about what a person can do with five thousand dollars. “Most small businesses begin with only five thousand dollars,” he says.
“Is that true?” I ask.
“Something like that,” he says, pauses, looks at Amanda and then back at me. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you’d like,” and Amanda shakes her head ‘no’ behind him and then he says, “But you could use the money to get a place of your own too.”
“Auntie would be so sad, if I left,” I say. She hates it when I refer to her as my aunt, and this has more to do with her age than me. She’s turning thirty soon. This, for some reason, makes her worry about things she hasn’t worried about before like children and death. I’m not sure why, and I don’t think she does either. She doesn’t want children and she’ll outlive the oaks. Every once in a while someone will ask her how it feels to be turning thirty, and she looks like she’s going to spit in their eye. These are the moments I feel close to her. Mostly, I stay out of her way.
She tells me to “Fuck off.”
Tim looks at both of us and says, “Hey, be nice, okay. You’re family.”
“We aren’t family,” she says faster than I can. On this point we bond as well.
“You’re both my family, and that makes you family.” He’s been saying this a lot. “We’re family,” “Among family,” “These are things we should do as a family,” and on and on. He uses the word “family” so much, I choke on it. Family picnics. Family reunions. Family ties. Family, family sat on a wall. Family doesn’t rhyme with any word. A dark and stormy family. What a word.
“It’s your money, Judy. Go skydiving in Brazil. Whatever you want,” he says.
My dad—his name was Sam…Sam…Sam. I forgot what I was saying.
When my dad started gambling, we were all a little surprised. He’d worked his whole life, mostly as a manager for a building supply company. He had enough to live a nice life during retirement, and I guess when he realized he wouldn’t be retiring, he decided to blow it all fast. It was easy, too, with casinos a ten minute walk away from his house. He lost a lot of money on blackjack. I don’t think he ever knew much about the game. I don’t think that was the point.
I asked him once how he could throw away so much on a game, not out of disappointment but curiosity. It’s something you don’t see often. Someone wanting to get rid of money. “Only place a man’s life does much changing is in a church or a casino, and I never had a mind for God.” I never thought it was true, but it sounded true, the way he put it. That’s what he would do with five thousand dollars. Burn the fucking pile of it. Anyway, I don’t know what to do with the money.
*
Brad stays an extra day one weekend, and I ask him if he’ll get in trouble, and he says, “Probably, but I can’t leave you right now,” and there was no reason for him to say it, no reason he couldn’t leave right then. It was the same as all of the other times he left. “I’m getting tired of leaving you,” he says.
We go to see an action movie with a predictable romance between the forty-five year old aging actor and the twenty year old up and coming actress. I say, “Now that was a romantic comedy,” on the way out, because no way would she fall in love with that mess. There isn’t enough makeup to cover the cocaine and alcohol damage to his face.
He says, “I don’t mind seeing her in movies. I’ll pay for that. The outfit didn’t hurt.”
“Who can shoot a gun in a leather bikini? I mean, I know technically you would still have the ability to shoot, but wouldn’t you stop and say, ‘I’m wearing a bikini made of leather. I give,’ and then throw down your gun. I mean, as a professional hitperson, you could never show your face at the conventions again. You know? Like, I just gave a crotch dance to this old dude I was hired to kill.”
“She had to distract him to get his gun away,” he says.
It’s a stupid conversation, and we both know, and that’s why it’s too late for me anyway. If he’d left yesterday, I may have stood a chance. But I already miss him and he’s not even gone.
*
It’s Amanda’s birthday, and she’s driving me crazy changing from jeans to skirts back to jeans. “How do I look?” every time, ignoring my answer every time. “I don’t want to go,” she says.
“Don’t go,” I say. “It’s your birthday.” Tim has planned a dinner with a few of their friends. It was his compromise from a surprise party with fifty guests. I talked him out of the surprise party, because she may have divorced him over it. She’s been so on edge, and I knew she’d hate it. I knew she’d hate it because I’d hate it, and we’re starting to have more in common than I care to admit. She follows me from the living room to the kitchen to the patio back in jeans. “Is there something you need?” I ask.
“I feel like I’m suffocating,” she says. “You’re always disappearing around here. Where do you go?”
“I don’t know. I like to go on the roof,” I say.
“The roof?” she asks.
I point to the ceiling, “Roof,” I say.
We walk to the bathroom, and I stand on the toilet to get to the window situated high near the ceiling. “Watch how I do it,” I say and reach for the tree branch positioned right by the roof. Even though it’s her house, she says, “I didn’t know about this,” like I’m showing her a secret room. The roof’s slant is slight and long which makes it easy to balance. I can tell she didn’t grow up climbing things, and she’s scared which makes the whole thing worthwhile. “Even if you fall, it’ll be a broken leg, tops. Probably only a sprain,” I assure her. “You could even get out of dinner.”
She manages, in her awkward balance, to flip me off and yelps a little when she takes the final step on to the roof and sits down beside me. “That was complicated,” she says. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes with her free hand, offers me one, I don’t take it.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I say.
“I don’t,” she says with the cigarette in her mouth. For an hour, we sit like this, not talking, looking at the stars, the moon, nothing at all. I don’t mind being around Amanda, really. It’s nice to be around someone who lets me be quiet. After a few minutes, she huffs out of her nose, mouth closed and says, “Fucking birthdays. People expect you to change, but you haven’t changed.”
“Well, to be fair, you have gotten meaner.”
She pushes my shoulder and I remind her we’re on a roof. “Tim always says the reason you and I don’t get a long is because if we ever did, we’d form a terrible union, turn the world to ash.”
“He’s probably right. I’m in,” I say, and we do this nod. We act like this is our thing we do.
*
The next time I’m at Brad’s, I notice a picture of us hanging on his fridge by a magnet. The lighting in the photo is soft; it’s in black and white. I’m laughing and clapping at something he’s said. He’s looking at me and smiling. We look like the real thing. A genuine article.
I want to ask him about the picture, but I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, so I sit by him on his big, white fluffy couch that he picked up from the ex-wife. It’s the only soft thing in the whole living room. I could live on this couch. He’s watching a football game and puts a lazy arm around me that jerks forward whenever his team does something or is about to do something or fails to do something.
I tell him, “My mom called. I don’t want to talk about it.”
He says, “So we don’t have to talk about it,” and he smiles. Maybe it’s the photo, the way he’s holding my hand, like he’s hiding it with his—something reminds me of when we met. So much is different now. People are dead. My hair is shorter. Other things. Aren’t there other things?
“Do you remember that night I flashed you my tits in the movie theater parking lot right after we met? You dared me.”
“I definitely remember,” he says.
“I never do things like that anymore,” I say.
“You should,” he says.
“You never dare me.”
“I dare you,” he says.
“Why don’t you ask about my mother?”
“You said you didn’t want to talk about it.”
I say, “She called to tell me she doesn’t have room in her new house for all of my things, and she needs to know where to send them. She wants me to send her money for shipping.”
“That’s fucked up,” he says and shakes his head. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her to throw it all away,” I say.
“What is it?”
“Old letters, books, clothes, photos. Boxes and boxes of the past.”
“Maybe you should keep the letters. And the photos,” he pauses. “And the books.” He thinks about it for a second. “Or maybe not. Never want more than you can fit in your car,” he says.
“You have more than you can fit in your car,” I say.
“I have more, but I don’t want more. The only thing I want in my car is you and my passport,” he says this like he’s giving me a grocery list, and I’m not sure he realizes what he’s said or meant to say it that way, but I lean over and kiss him full on the mouth. It’s not a romantic kiss, really, more like celebratory kiss. I’m not sure what I’m celebrating. This is all new. I’m still learning the language. I don’t know the customs.
*
Brad goes back to Texas, and I go back to Tim’s. I’m headed upstairs, and Amanda is heading downstairs. One of us has to make way, and it isn’t Amanda. I thought maybe we’d be on friendlier terms after bonding on the roof, but roofs don’t mean what they used to mean. She says, “Tim left your check on the kitchen counter. It’s been sitting there for a week. If you don’t deposit it soon, I’m going to scream.”
“I don’t know what to do with it,” I say.
“You take it to the bank and you deposit it,” she says. “You’re making this worse. It’s sitting there collecting all of this meaning. Go to Vegas, that’s what I say.”
“I don’t think you and I share common dreams,” I say.
“You need better dreams,” she says. “Tell me where you want to go, and I’ll get you there. I’ve got a friend who works for a travel agent. She’s always telling me about these package deals. Where would you want to go if you could?”
“I don’t know,” I say. People apparently have places they want to go. I have some things to figure out about what I want in my car.
“I’ll look into it for you.”
“Thank you, Amanda. That’s sweet.”
“I’m not sweet,” she says, “I’m the motherfucking shit.” She winks when she says it and hops down the stairs, her red hair flowing, her arms held up beside her. Even when she says ‘motherfucking shit,’ it sounds classy. Maybe I should reconsider my feelings about winking.
*
Let me start over. Brad doesn’t get bogged down the way I do. He doesn’t worry, so I don’t worry. Or I try not to. More to the point, I try. I’ve arrived for the weekend, but we haven’t said much. He’s watching something, me I guess, and I say, “Hey there.”
“Hey yourself,” he says.
“Well,” I say and look at the neighbor’s yard. “I brought a lot of stuff.”
“I noticed,” he says.
By my feet are five bags with everything I need for now: clean clothes, a toothbrush, a German Shepherd named Buckley. Other things. “Don’t you want to know why I have so many bags?” I ask.
“We’re long past that. Long past it,” and the second time he says long he stretches out the word. “You can bring whatever you want. I don’t mind.”
“I thought we could go somewhere.”
“Where can we go with two days?”
“Anywhere in the world. Wherever it is they clear heads,” I say.
He reaches for my hand and pulls me onto his lap. I worry I’ll crush him under the weight, so I try to stand back up, but he pulls me back to him. “Stop trying to get away,” he says with a smile. “This is where you want to be, isn’t it?”
And it is. The only place in the whole world. Vegas has nothing on Brad’s lap.
*
What you can do with five thousand dollars is you can buy a new, used car, fifteen years old, with bad circuiting so the headlights go in and out when you hit a bump. You can go on a shopping trip for job interview clothes. You can buy a canoe, keep it for a day, return the canoe. When you see a painting by a local artist that looks like a tantrum between purple and red, you can buy it even though it’s overpriced. You’ll find it goes fast on its own without you trying to burn it fast. You’ll find things are the same as they were before you had it and after it’s gone they’re still like that.
It’s been a few months now, and I’m settling into life with Brad, but it’s still weird, like I’m playing house. He says this is because I don’t know how to be happy, no one ever showed me. We’ve taken the car on a couple of road trips, and I currently owe $350 in tickets from a bad light.
Brad and I are at a sports bar with Amanda and Tim, and we—mostly Tim—are having this conversation about the delay of pro basketball this season due to player negotiations. Tim talks about this guy from college he used to buy pot from, “What did we call him? He could play some mean ball, man. He had this intense way of looking and talking at people, but he was a real nice guy. He was kind of nice. I took the last beer at a party and he told me he was going to gut me with a hairpin. Even though I know it’s not possible, he made me believe it was possible.”
“That’s how I feel about Judy,” Brad says, teasing me.
“You have weird relationships,” Amanda says.
“You are a weird relationship,” I counter and this sounds like a smart thing to say with a few beers under my belt, but she rolls her eyes and then I know it’s not.
Brad says, “If he hadn’t gotten mixed up with dealing, he’d probably be playing pro right now. You love the game, you play the game,” he says like he’s a player.
“That’s it, that’s all,” Amanda says, and they clink glasses like this is something they say a lot. Maybe it is.
“Pretty Boy,” he says, “That’s what we called him.”
“Maybe that’s why he wanted to gut you with a hairpin,” Brad says.
“He’d sign the contract. No way he’d let the season go to waste. I bet you anything. These players, they’re thinking long term—like fifteen years down the road—you can’t think like that, though,” he says. “All you got is right now.”
This sounds something like the only place a man can change is in a casino, don’t want what can’t fit in your car, blow it all fast. I’m not sure where the people in my life get their philosophy, but I’m beginning to believe.
“What you got is right now,” Brad says like he just thought of it. He’s the first person in the world to have said it.
“That’s it. That’s all,” I say.
“You get what I’m saying,” he tells me, but I don’t. I don’t get much, but I’m trying to go with it. See what happens. Clear the head. One family, two family. Family rhymes with orange. Family here, family there. All I want is you.
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