Heather(65)

You head to the checkout, the shelves next to you bright with shampoos and conditioners. Before you can reach the end, where the registers are, you are accosted by a wall of baby formula to your right, a blue-eyed child with a feathery tuft of brown hair staring out at you from a canister promising Only the Best. The prices underneath the formula canisters are staggering, so much more than the milk you have in your basket. You let your eyes drift to the packages of diapers, add the cost of one box to one canister of formula and find that its more than you budget for a week’s worth of food. A display of teething rings and pacifiers catches your eye, all of that pastel plastic. Before you can think about it, you grab one and shove it underneath your coat.

“Annabelle?”

You startle, drop the pacifier on the ground, look up to see Della, a friend of your mother’s from when you were a girl. Della and her husband, Keith, would come over for bonfires in the yard, your father building the flames higher and higher, roasting marshmallows to a golden brown for you and Sabrina, two at a time so that neither of you had to wait. Your mother cooked and you all ate outside under the stars, paper plates in your laps. Della and her husband could both play the fiddle, but she was better. You could see it even then in the way she let herself get lost in the music, the way her eyes closed like she was savoring it, while Keith often looked around to see who was admiring him play.

Della looks to the pacifier, then to your face. Behind her, there’s a little girl in the cart, maybe two or three years old. Your mother told you once that Della and her husband were having trouble conceiving a child, and she would drop pouches of crushed herbs on their porch that were meant to help. Looks like she didn’t need you, you think, with a treasonous thrill.

“How … how are you?”

“Fine,” you say, the response so automatic by now it is like a punchline. You think of Della and your mother, their mouths wine-stained, leaning together, laughing, reaching out for one another’s wrists. You and Sabrina desperate to be let in on the jokes, while the men rolled their eyes and flicked beer tabs into the fire.

“That’s good. I haven’t seen your dad around in a while.”

“He’s busy. Work.”

She narrows her eyes at you. “Right.” Silence between you. Even the child is quiet. She sighs. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry we stopped coming around.”

There had been a fight, before your mother left. Your father had started drinking more, losing himself, shouting, all impulse and ego. He broke the bow of Della’s husband’s fiddle in an argument, tossed it into the flames on the bonfire like it was kindling.

“Well, she’s not here.”

Della sighs. “I wanted her to leave him. But I thought she’d take you.”

“Do … do you know where she is?” you ask, your throat gone to sandpaper.

Della shakes her head. “I don’t know. I’m so sorry, Annabelle. I miss her though, and I know you must miss her too. I still think of her every spring, when the heather blooms.”

The little girl starts to fuss. She doesn’t like this talk, you think, of mothers disappearing.

“And Sabrina? I heard some rumors. She shouldn’t be hanging around with—”

“Sabrina is fine.”

“It’s just that, I’ve started working at the police station. They had to bring her in the other night. Something about a fight.”

This is news to you. “She was arrested?”

“I don’t know the whole story, but there was property damage, a broken window. Down at the bait shop. There had been an argument. It was late. I wasn’t there. I only answer phones during the day. But I’m worried about her. About both of you.”

A shriek from the little girl in the cart. Della turns to her, pats her head.

“This is Wren. She’s three.”

You nod. You can’t look at her anymore without thinking of Della and your mother, both of them with their big laughs and quick-moving hands, and who, from across the yard, were nearly indistinguishable with their heads bent together whispering secrets, plotting, the ends of their hair touching and making a curtain in front of their faces.

Della bends to pick up the pacifier on the ground, holds it out to you. Her eyes glitter with questions.

“Why would you take this, Annabelle? You had it under your coat.”

You shrug.

Ask me again, you think, the same way you did with Miss Hamilton. Ask me again who this is for and I’ll split like a ripe fruit, like the pods of seeds my mother dried for you to prime your womb for a child, like the firewood underneath my father’s axe, like the thin skin of a roasted marshmallow before you pressed it between two graham crackers.

Della opens her mouth and you can almost taste the relief of telling her. This woman who may be the closest thing to a mother you’ve got left. Squint and it’s her. Close your eyes and remember the feeling of her fingers along your scalp while she braided your hair and your mother worked on Sabrina’s. But then the child screams again, ear-splittingly shrill, and Della remembers that she already has a daughter, a daughter who is calling her back, territorial in her fury, her small face red and clenched in outrage.

“Don’t be like her, Annabelle. Don’t go getting into trouble like Sabrina. Finish school and get away. Start your life.”

That’s the story everyone wants for you. Your mother, Miss Hamilton, Della. The good sister, the one who did everything right. You shove the pacifier back on the display rack.