Jordan’s tie. Lily wasn’t jealous, she reminded herself. There was no jealousy. In only a few days, Lily was certain, Jordan would ask again, as he so often did, if she’d marry him, and this time Lily would say yes. Lily would be engaged when she met her mother again, as well as enrolled in community college. She had signed up only for a watercolor class as of yet, but her mother didn’t have to know that. As far as her mother would be concerned, Lily was poised to make none of the mistakes she had.
But as Lily looked at Jordan in the window, this boy too inept to know his own way around a necktie, she wondered how long their approaching marriage would last. And when they divorced, where would she go? Would she find herself flung far, like her mother? Lily imagined herself in some place like Atlantic City, lonely and hopeful, feeling her stomach sink every time the seat of the Ferris wheel dipped down toward the ocean.
Lily’s mother had left Lily’s father many times in the years before he killed himself. Though Lily always missed her father during the days they spent in their grandmother’s house, there in the antique shop, she thrived on her mother’s guilt. Lily’s mother, frightened of ruining the lives of her children, lavished attention on her daughters during those days of separation. She’d let Lily join her in her bubble bath and even allowed her sips of the peach Riunite she drank from a wide-mouthed water goblet. Her mother had looked so pretty, pink and naked, her wet curls clinging to her cheeks. She’d tickle Lily’s ribs with her toes beneath the water.
One afternoon, their mother spirited Lily and Mabel off to Omaha for shopping in an overpriced downtown department store, then lunch at King Fong’s Café. Mabel and their mother had chow mein, and Lily, put off by the foreign words on the menu, had a hamburger. After eating, their mother broke open a fortune cookie.
“Good news will be brought to you by mail,” she had read, brushing the cookie crumbs from the rabbit fur of her winter coat’s lapel. Lily could still remember the café, though she’d never been there since. She remembered the long walk up steep stairs and picking at the pearl in the inlay of the wood tabletop. The dark, ornate chandeliers, with their silhouettes of rolling dragons and black orchids, looked too heavy to be held up by the ceiling. Lily remembered the cold, white sky bright in the cross-shaped windows. There’d been some stained glass in the panes, reminding Lily of church.
“It will be a love letter from Daddy,” Mabel told Lily, treating Lily like she was an infant needing consoling and assurance. Lily wanted to sock Mabel in the jaw for it.
“No,” Lily’s mother said. She started to cry and she pressed a paper napkin to her cheek. “No love letters. He doesn’t love me. Why should he love me? Would you?” Lily never knew what to do when her mother cried, when she asked the questions that made no sense, so she did what she always did, which was to look down and wait for Mabel to do something. Mabel finally reached across the table and gently stroked the rabbit fur. “I wish I wouldn’t cry in front of my children,” her mother said, trying to smile.
Lily wished she wouldn’t either. No matter how often her mother cried, Lily never got used to it. When her mother would fall apart, and her mother might fall apart in the middle of anything, Lily couldn’t breathe and couldn’t think. Sometimes Lily would start crying too, and sometimes that worked to make her mother stop.
At that lunch at King Fong’s that day, all three of them sat there distraught, their cosmetics-counter makeovers streaming down their faces, staining the collars of their new blouses. As Lily looked down at her hands and her chewed nails, she saw the price tag still dangling from the cuff.
Good news actually did arrive by mail a few days later, just as the fortune cookie predicted. They’d entered a raffle at the department store and each of them had won a free set-and-style from the hair salon at the back of the store, and the pink coupons featuring a cartoon lady in ridiculously big curlers came to their grandmother’s house in a pink envelope. By that time, however, they’d moved back into the apartment in town, and they actually stayed with their father through the rest of that winter and most of that summer and never made it back to that department store. It had relieved Lily to watch the coupons over the months fade and curl in the sun on the windowsill above the kitchen sink.
JORDAN, in a dark blue suit with baggy trousers, his hand-painted tie depicting long-legged women in polka-dot bathing suits, brought down a bucket of ice and a bottle of whiskey for the Manhattans. In his back pocket, he carried a bottle of apple cider. Jordan liked all the sweet drinks, all the coolers flavored like soda pop, and the ices with pieces of fruit. But Lily thought booze should taste like dirt and smoke and wood, and she preferred bourbon or a dark beer.
“When ’arf of your bullets fly wide in the ditch,” Jordan quoted from somewhere, examining the portable martini glass, “don’t call your martini a cross-eyed old bitch.”
Mabel carried the sweet vermouth. She looked pretty but too thin in a clingy dress that changed colors from blue to green to purple as she moved in the candlelight. When their mother abandoned them with their lazy grandmother, all the farmers’ wives and widows in the area left recipes to encourage their grandmother to cook, to fatten Mabel up. When looking at the yellowed recipe cards, Lily had dreamed of life in their warm little homes, of pictures of Jesus on the walls and the smell of cinnamon and clove in the kitchens.
Mabel put the bottle on the table and opened her other hand to let five chokecherries roll out. A tree on the other side of a fence down the hill dropped the fruit onto their land every late summer. “I didn’t have any maraschinos,” Mabel said.
Lily ate the sour chokecherry from around its tiny pit, and with the sharp taste she saw her father standing in the pasture, tearing his jeans on barbed wire, the muscles in his arms straining as he reached up to pull down a branch. Even with the branch bent, Lily still couldn’t reach the chokecherries, and he’d shake the branch, and she’d try to catch them as they rained in front of her. Because of the sandburs that stuck in Lily’s socks, her father would carry her back across the pasture. She’d lay her head on his shoulder and press her lips against his neck, touching her tongue to the salt of his sweat.
“Do you think our mother knows?” Lily said, dropping a chokecherry into the Manhattan that Jordan shook together for her. “About why Daddy did it?” It was a question Lily and Mabel had passed back and forth between each other for years, a question worked smooth like sea glass.
Mom must know something was Mabel’s usual answer, but tonight she simply said, “No.” Mabel took a ribbon of frosting from the cake and ate it, then sipped her Manhattan, cringing from the bite of the whiskey. “What could she know, really?”
“Seems to me,” Lily said, “she’d have some thoughts.”
“He had children too young,” Mabel said. “Married too young. He was as young as you are now.”
“This isn’t so young,” Lily said, though she couldn’t imagine having a baby to look after. She could still remember taking baths in the kitchen sink, her mother washing her hair with a bar of soap. Her own childhood was still fresh in her mind. “How old were you that one birthday?”
“Eight,” Mabel said, knowing exactly what Lily was talking about.
“You ever hear about Mabel’s eighth birthday?” Lily asked Jordan, and though he nodded, Lily talked about it anyway. Lily put her bare feet up onto Jordan’s knees, and crossed her ankles. “Grandpa had died not too long before, but Grandma still had a bull in the pasture. Daddy had helped her sell it, so he put it into the back of the pickup, and me and Mabel and Mom all crammed into the front with Dad to take it to some farm down the road.”
“There were tall railings up the sides of the truck,” Mabel said, “and the bull broke through them and ran away.” They followed the bull as it ran into town trampling through somebody’s backyard tomato plants, disrupting a picnic in a park, tearing down Chinese lanterns and a badminton net. Mabel always denied it, but she had cried as the night dragged on, the bull ruining her birthday. But Lily had loved watching something from her tiny life shake awake the whole sleepy town.
“I forget how you caught him,” Jordan said.
“We