August Moon (9 page)

“Mom?”

She held out her hands. “Mira.”

I stood my ground. My mom and I had talked on the phone in June but hadn’t seen each other in over a year. She had never visited me in Battle Lake, and I felt territorial, off-balance. “What are you doing here?”

Her hands hovered in the air like two premature greeters at a surprise party and then dropped to her side. We had the same eyes, gray and serious. We were also the same height and build, but her dress and hair were conservative, particularly against my tank top and Indian skirt. “I’m sorry. I wanted to see you. I should have called. Is this the dog you’re sitting for, Luna?”

I wasn’t letting her off the hook. “Why’d you want to see me?”

“I don’t know, Miranda, because you’re my daughter? Because you call me in June and tell me you’ve been beaten up and haven’t called since? Because you’ve been here since March, living not even a hundred miles from me, and I don’t know what your house looks like?”

Luna whimpered between us. My mom and I also had the same voice. “You might as well come on in, then. I have plans tonight, though, so you can’t stay long.”

I strode past her, and she quietly followed me inside. “This is the living room, over there is the kitchen, my bedroom and bathroom are off this door, and the spare bedroom and office are over there.”

“Tiger Pop!” Mom held out her hands to my kitty, and the traitor ate it up. She hugged him and scratched his eternal ear itch. “I can’t believe how healthy he looks! How old is this cat?”

“Thirteen.” I glared at him.

“And your house looks really beautiful. Clean. You must love it out here.”

I didn’t want to tell her I was moving. I didn’t want her to be here. It felt too close, too unexpected, and besides, she always brought the specter of my dad with her. We had pushed through some barriers via a phone conversation, but having her in my house was too much, too soon. “It’s fine.”

“Can I see your gardens?” She set Tiger Pop down and strode out before I could object.

“It’s been dry,” I said defensively.

“Oh, Mira! They’re gorgeous! Look at the size of your tomatoes. And you have fresh dill. Are you going to can this year? You could come home. We could can together.”

“I am home.”

“Of course.” She looked down at her feet.

“Mom, why are you here? Why today?”

Her smile fled. I witnessed her fifty-four years grind down on her with all their weight, and she laid it out between us like rotten food. “I have breast cancer, Miranda. I found out last week. I didn’t want to tell you over the phone.”

The earth grew papery underfoot. I had ditched Paynesville as soon as I graduated, and I had deliberately left behind as many memories as I could, determined to craft my own life from that point on. Suddenly, though, long-forgotten mental pictures were leaking out. My mom pushing me on our tire swing when I was five, or staying up to read to me when I had chicken pox in eighth grade, or driving me to my first dance, the one where the boys stood on one side of the gym and girls on the other. With those memories came a glimpse of my dad before his drinking got bad, bringing home a calico kitten for me, laughing with me as it pounced at the air. “How bad?”

“Not bad. They caught it early.” She smiled, almost apologetically, and brushed her hair back from her face in a gesture I recognized from my childhood. “I start chemo in three weeks, and the prognosis is good. I should be fine, Mir, with God’s grace. I just thought you deserved to know. Face to face.”

Tears and angry words fought for escape, one climbing on the back of the other to reach my head. The angry words won. “What am I supposed to say to that?”

She came over and held me while I stood rigid. “You don’t need to say anything. I came by to let you know, that’s all, and to say I love you. You have a home whenever you need it.”

I nodded stiffly. “I know.” It was petty, horrible petty, but I couldn’t tell her I loved her. Not right then.

“Mira, look at me. I’m going to be fine. This is just a wake-up call, that’s all. Life’s short. I would like to see you more. What do I need to do to make that happen?”

Suddenly, the whole outdoors were too big, and I could feel myself disconnect and spray out. It was terrifying. “I need time.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know. I need to process this. I’ll call you in a few days, okay?”

Her smile was small, but it had a flash of hope in its corners. “Okay. You call me next week.” She waved at the pets. “Bye Luna! Bye Tiger Pop! You take care of each other. Love you, Mira. You’re a good person.” She wiped my cheek, got in her car, fastened her seat belt, and drove away.

I walked into the house, straight to the bathroom, and yanked out the bottle of tequila. It was supper time, and I was going for liquid nourishment. I took two big swigs and held the bottle up. “Here’s to you, Mom and Dad.” I kept the bottle in my hand, ripped the
Tank Girl
CD out of my rack, and cranked it to full volume. Between the liquor and the music, I was going to drown out the raw truth, that I had realized I wanted my mom in my life more than anything—at the same moment I discovered she wasn’t going to live forever. I suppose that possibility was what I had been running from since I moved to the Twin Cities after graduation, and it had hunted me down and found me all the way in Battle Lake. It was frightening. By the time the sun was taking its unrelenting heat to another part of the world, I was toast.

“Luna? Tiger Pop? You wanna help me garden?” They weren’t in the mood to enable, so I tripped outside, fighting the tilting earth. “You’re a pretty big weed,” I said, reaching for the base of my tallest tomato plant. It took three tries before I had it out of the ground, ripe fruit busting around my feet like bloody bombs.

“And you. You’ve never been anything but trouble.” Up came the Brussels sprouts, followed by a broccoli, two cabbages, and a whole row of onions, their green stems turned to brown as they were getting ready to set up for winter. When my arms were too tired to rip, I stomped, feeling vegetables go flat and dead under my shoes.

“And thanks for all the help planting, Johnny. You’ve really been a big, stand-up, follow-through kind of guy.” I leapt in the air and came down on a watermelon. It was hard, and I rolled off, landing with a painful thud. I wiped myself off, nodded at my double-
vision gardening, and went inside. I made it as far as the couch before blacking out.

___

“Luna? Huh? Luna?” The licking wouldn’t stop, and when I rolled over to push her away, my skin felt tight and sticky. I raised myself up on shaky arms and the room shifted under me. My heart was tripping oddly and I could have woken up in Marrakesh for all that I recognized my surroundings. The room was hot and close, and the sun was already two clicks off the horizon. It must be near eight a.m. Luna continued to lick me patiently, bringing me back to myself.

I recognized the couch, and the house, and when I pulled myself up and lurched outside, I recognized the front lawn. My stomach shifted, and I had to swallow hard to keep everything down. “I must have tied one hell of a one on,” I said to Luna, who was still by my side. She looked at me sadly. I returned the look and saw the white bumps on my arms. Tomato seeds? I stared, and squinted back at my garden. I sensed it, a fiend lurking in the back of my brain, some horrible news about to break through and burn my life down. I stumbled down to my hand-tended plot, the center of my summer universe, my one saving grace.

My garden. It was destroyed. It looked like an elephant had rolled in it, grazed in it, danced in it. There were a few spindly vegetables still in the ground, tilting precariously, but they were so denuded it was impossible to tell what sort of plant they had been. Whole onions lay scattered like dirty pearls, and green leaves were stomped into pulp. I wept at what I had done, and then cried harder when I remembered that my mom had breast cancer. I cried so hard that I got hiccups, and when my throat was hoarse and my body was as dry as the air around me, I went into the house and gathered up all the liquor. I even pulled my secret stash of whiskey from the desk drawer in the office.

I crashed the bottles into the burning barrel and lit them up into a whooshing blaze. Mrs. Berns’ words,
don’t do nothing for a man,
whispered to me, and I listened to them. I was done with drinking. It had killed my father and wormed its way into my life, but his problem wasn’t going to be mine. I had been here before, but I wasn’t ever coming back to this spot.

When the flames burned themselves out, I turned to my pillaged, heartbroken, betrayed garden, my head thick and raw. I picked what whole vegetables I could find and gathered enough to fill two bags. I made a pile of the plants I had killed and burned them also. When it was all said and done, I was left with two live tomato plants, the carrots and potatoes, and one helluva hard watermelon.

A clean start. That’s all I wanted. A clean start.

Mrs. Berns and Sarah
Ruth sensed my strange, impenetrable mood and left me alone for the morning shift. I worked robotically and grieved what I had done. What could I ever do to make up for getting trashed and destroying my garden? Hurting the earth was the worst thing I could do, because there was no one to forgive me.

“You should go get some lunch.”

“I’m not hungry, Mrs. Berns.”

“I am. Will you please get me a bagel?”

“You hate bagels.”

“Not as much as I hate mopey, pain-in-the-ass, black-mood girls. I don’t know what put you in this funk, but Sarah Ruth and I need a break from it. Take a walk.”

“Fine.” The coffee shop was as good a place as any to hate myself. I grabbed the grocery bag of peppers, onions, and tomatoes and shuffled over to the Fortune Café. My plan was to share my abused vegetables with Sid and Nancy, the owners of the Café. They had been in business together in Battle Lake for five years, but they’d been a couple at least two decades. The Café’s front room was a coffee shop and their back room was a combination library-computer room-visiting space. I had played many a Scrabble game with Sid in the back, her vocabulary a fair match for mine. The three of us were solid friends, though I was closer to Sid than to Nancy, and I felt my shame sink even deeper as I walked into their store, the inviting smell of cinnamon and coffee washing over me.

“Hey Mira!” Sid smiled from behind the counter she was washing as I entered. The lunch rush had already come and gone, and except for a three-seat table of tourists near the front, the place was empty. I normally felt comforted by the surroundings—forest-green-and-white-tiled floor, blonde wood tables, and white walls hung with watercolors of flowers and country schoolhouses. Now, the familiarity somehow increased my guilt.

“Hi.”

“Jeez, you look rough. Catch a summer cold?”

“Maybe.”

She stopped washing the counter and crossed her arms in front of her. “Maybe? There something you want to talk about?”

I couldn’t meet her eyes. “You ever do something so bad that you could never fix it?”

Sid studied all the vegetables I had placed in front of her, then looked at me with a glimmer of understanding under her graying eyebrows. “This is an awful lot of vegetables all at once, some of them not ripe. You get a storm out there?”

“Of sorts.”

Sid sighed. “No, I never did anything so bad I couldn’t fix it, and if you’re still alive, neither have you.”

I snuffled. “What if it was really bad?”

“Like attacking your own garden?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you apologize to your garden, you replant what you can, and you figure out what made you so crazy.”

“I already know.”

“I figured you did. Anything you can do something about?”

I thought about my dad, my mom, the dead cheerleader, Johnny with his sweet blue eyes and strong hands. “Maybe.”

“Then I suggest you stop feeling sorry for yourself and start doing.” She wiped her hands on her apron decisively and grabbed my hand. “Come here. I have something to show you. Nance, can you watch the front? I’ll be right back.”

She led me upstairs, to her and Nancy’s living quarters. I had spent plenty of time with her in the lower half of the building but had never been to the second level. This section of the house was as neat as the downstairs, with a separate kitchen, bathroom, living room, and bedroom. The country-fancy look of the Café was not duplicated on this level. Everything up here was clean lines, hardwood floors, and pale denim-colored walls. The smell of baking bread wafted up through the cracks, but it wasn’t as strong, and there was a clean soap scent up here that cut through it.

Sid led me into the bedroom and opened the dark oak chest at the foot of her bed. She rifled through the deep container, smiling fondly as she brought up a box of pictures.

“Have a seat,” she said, indicating the white, yellow, and blue patchwork quilt on the bed. “I’m going to show you something that I’ve never shown anyone but Nancy.”

“Your senior photo?”

“Worse.” She handed over a Polaroid of a charred building, its supporting beams sticking up like blackened bones. I held it close, sniffing for charcoal.

“What is it?”

“My parents’ garage.”

“Oh my god! Was anyone hurt?”

“No. My mom and dad were on vacation, and that’s why I burned it down that day.”

“You burned down your parents’ garage?”

“To the ground. I destroyed their minivan, all the pictures they had in storage in the garage attic, all their gardening tools. Burnt it all to the ground.”

“Why?”

She sat heavily on the floor with a mix of sadness and humor in her eyes. “I was pissed off. I was a teenager, and I had been trying to come out to them for years. They wouldn’t hear me, and so I thought I would do something they couldn’t ignore. Pretty stupid, huh?”

“Did they listen to you?”

“No. And they still haven’t. They prefer to think of me and Nancy as ‘roommates.’ They also didn’t press charges against me for torching the garage, they didn’t claim any insurance, and they paid the fire station’s bills. We all just acted like nothing happened. They probably thought they were doing me a favor, but it was the shittiest thing they could have done.”

“Did you tell them you were sorry?”

“Eventually, after many, many years of feeling horrible for burning their memories. It was after I figured out I didn’t need their approval that I could finally apologize and mean it. Even better, I forgave
them
. And I saved a picture so I’d never forget where I’d been and how far I’ve come, and so I never go back. We make mistakes, Mira. We learn, we change what we can, and we forgive ourselves, as hard as it is. That’s life.”

I felt an interior weight shift. It didn’t go away, but it didn’t feel so heavy anymore. “You’re a wise woman.”

“You’re not so bad yourself.” She treated me to a smile like balm and packed up the picture. On the way back downstairs, she also offered some juicy gossip. “By the way, you know the new family at New Millennium Bible? The Holier Thanthous?”

“The Meales?”

“That’s them. You’ll never guess what happened this morning. Their daughter, Alicia, the one who looks like a young Lynda Carter?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but yeah.”

“She was in this morning. Nancy caught her stealing a bag of biscotti. Can you believe that!”

Nancy met us at the bottom of the stairs at the mention of her name, wiping her hands on her apron. “Yah, caught her red handed. And do you know what she said to me? She said she was just putting it into her purse so it’d be easier to carry to the counter.”

“You didn’t believe her?”

“That’s like the lion telling the antelope it’s just going to clean its hind end. I told her I was going to call the police, and she threatened me with the Liberty Law School. Said it was started by Jerry Falwell and was turning out lawyers only too happy to deal with people like me.”

I smiled for the first time that day. “Coffee shop owners?”

“I guess. That one is wicked.”

That about summed it up, as far as I could tell. “So what’d you do?”

“Let her go. We don’t need the trouble.” Nancy straightened her apron, squeezed Sid’s hand, and headed back to the front counter. On her way, she hollered over her shoulder at Sid. “Did you ask her yet?”

I looked from Nancy to Sid. “Ask me what?”

“A favor. I know you’re busy with two jobs, but we’re hoping you can open up the Café tomorrow. Nancy’s sister is having surgery in Fargo later today, and we want to stay overnight so she isn’t alone.”

“Anything serious?”

“Not too bad. Just gallstones. She doesn’t have any other family close by, though, so we want to be there.”

My dearth of family felt sharp for a moment, but the pang was replaced by my bounty of friends. “Of course I’ll open up. I can’t promise to do any baking, though.”

“We’ll have it all stocked up for you, and a sign saying that the fancy coffees will need to wait. We’re planning on being back by 10:00, so you’ll be able to skedaddle to the library before Mrs. Berns turns it into a house of ill repute.”

“Perfect.” As I collected keys and opening instructions, I warmed inside. Action felt good, as did helping my friends. Sid was right. I needed to fix what I could, starting with finding that dirt on the Meales I had yet to uncover. It was bad enough they were messing with the library—I wasn’t going to let Alicia mess with my friends, too. I had promised Ron I would head out to New Millennium Bible Camp this afternoon to check out the Creation Science Camp, and my very innocent reporting for the
Battle Lake Recall
would be a perfect cover for some earnest snooping. Once I tipped that playing field, I could work on repairing my garden.

Sid gave me an overview of the till before sending me on my way with a free, sun-dried tomato and Greek olive cream cheese bagel and some parting words.

“Hey, you know why Lutherans hate premarital sex?”

“Why?”

“They’re afraid it’ll lead to dancing.”

I left ten pounds lighter and decided to take advantage of my lunch hour to visit 4Ts and place another check in my “good deeds” column. I worked on the chewy bagel as I trudged through the kiln-like air, sweat beads gathering at my hairline and separating to race down my neck. I pulled my V-necked T-shirt from my chest and peered down at the rivulet forming between my A-cups.

“I wouldn’t hold my breath, darlin’. If they haven’t grown yet, it doesn’t do any good to water ’em.”

“Hi, Kennie.”

“And didn’t I tell you to stop by my house? I have a business deal that I know you’re going to want to get in on.”

I thought back to our conversation in the library and realized she had in fact invited me to her house, but I had been too distracted by the petition to react properly. Visions of topless octogenarians, pre-assembled penis enlargement devices, and a walkie-talkie-sex service scuttled through my brain, and all the apprehension I should have felt the first time she mentioned a “business deal” came at me like a swarm of mosquitoes. “Why don’t you just tell me what it is right now? I’ve got a minute.”

“Nope. You’ve gotta see the demo model at my house.”

Jesus. It was the penis enlargement device. I was sure of it. “I’m not much of an entrepreneur.”

“I just want to know if I can display one in the library. Once you see it, you’ll want one for yourself, and who knows? You might decide to invest. I tell you, it’s gonna be big.”

What a great motto,
I thought to myself. And if I could blow off Kennie just a couple more times, I’d be able to make it out of Battle Lake without ever seeing her latest “business proposition.” “I’ll come over tomorrow morning, ’kay? I have to open up the Fortune for Sid and Nancy, and then I’ll stop by before I open the library.” There wouldn’t be time, but she didn’t need to know that.

“You won’t be sorry, darlin’!” She wiggled her fingers at me and marched off in the other direction, the spangles on her sequined tank top catching the sun and turning her into a strolling disco ball. The brightness was probably for the best, as her blinding shirt made it nearly impossible to see her Daisy Dukes, or, on Kennie, ill-fitting denim underwear. I could fool myself that it was a trick of the glare on my eyes and not the outline of a terrifically deep butt crack showcased in distressed, acid-washed denim that I saw as she disappeared around the corner by the bank.

I entered the cool interior of 4Ts and made my way around the milling shoppers. I recognized Kaitlyn near the front window, the well-proportioned blonde teenager from my first visit. The short, bubble-nosed brunette behind the counter must be Lydia. I made my way over to her and prepared to tell a little white lie.

“Hi, are you Lydia?”

She smiled at me. Her eyeteeth were unusually skinny, giving her mouth a quirky, friendly appearance despite the haunted look in her eyes. “Yup. Can I help you?”

“I’m Mira James. Lucy worked for me at the library. I wanted to say I was sorry about her death. I heard you two were good friends.”

Her upper lip quivered. “Yeah.”

“Did she make it to cheerleading practice the day before, um, before she was found?”