Everything You Want Me to Be(60)
Mary opened the front door and I quickly shut the fridge. She went to the sink without a word to me and started washing dishes with the air of someone finishing an interrupted activity.
I moved toward the door, my body automatically retreating. Apart from eating and sleeping, I lived in the storage room now. Even if Mary hadn’t acted like an island for the better part of the winter, it was ludicrous at this point for me to make the effort to reach her. Before I disappeared tonight though, curiosity got the best of me.
“Who was that?”
“Harry Tomlin.”
“What did he want?”
“I asked him to come out.” She almost didn’t elaborate, but then she shrugged as she tipped a pitcher upside down into the rinse rack. “He’s an old friend from high school. I’m having him put in some new windows.”
“Windows?”
“It’s too drafty in here. There’s no point in replacing the boiler until the windows are done.”
“Boiler? What the hell, Mary?” I didn’t know what stunned me more—her plans or that she was actually sharing them with me. I paced to the living room door to make sure Elsa was still asleep. “You’re the one who freaks out whenever I spend a dime. Why are you pouring money—my money, I might add—into this crap heap of a house?”
“I won’t touch your precious paycheck, all right? Keep it. Mom’s got her social security and I’ll make my own money.”
“Doing what? Selling eggs at fifteen cents a pop?”
A hint of a smile played with her mouth. “Thirty-five cents, actually.”
“What?”
“Organic, free-range, family-farm eggs.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
She didn’t answer at first. It was frustrating, talking to her profile. She wouldn’t even turn around to have a conversation with me. Never mind that she had every right to shove me down, stomp on my balls, and kick me out of her mother’s crap heap of a house. She didn’t know that.
“Remember going to the farmers’ markets in Minneapolis? How you always spouted off about organic this and cruelty-free that?”
I did remember, but the memories weren’t splashed in her sarcasm. I’d honestly—and obviously stupidly—thought those were our good times. We were living in our Victorian walk-up and every Sunday morning in the summer we read the paper over coffee, commenting on and tossing sections until the dining room table was covered with tented and folded stories, cartoons, and the remains of the coupon pages after they’d met Mary’s scissors.
Later we’d walk down to the market and stroll through the stalls. Sometimes we only bought a baguette for brunch and ate it on the way home, tearing off chunks and washing them down with a smoothie. A few times we decided to make things on the spur of the moment and came home with forty tomatoes and peppers, splattering the kitchen with a blind attempt at salsa. Those were usually my ideas. Mary always had a shopping list and a plan; she coolly checked off items as we made our way down the rows.
When we first started going, she raised her eyebrows at the number of Hmong vendors, but she never said anything beyond, “They don’t farm out by my family,” and she bought anyone’s produce as long as it was good quality and not overpriced. She talked shop with the farmers, discussing rainfall and temperatures. She didn’t care about herbicides or how the cows were treated. I was the one who insisted on the organic stalls while Mary would roll her eyes and laugh. When I tried to show her articles about the effects of chemical fertilizers and insecticides, she scoffed and said, “There’s a study for everything. You know you’re going to die anyway, don’t you?”
She was never interested in organic farming. So where the hell had this come from?
“I’ve been talking to a guy near Rochester who has the whole operation down. Mobile coops and vegetarian feed. He sells to restaurants in the cities at a premium price, and we’re going to start doing the farmers’ market circuit in the spring.”
“We?”
“Me and him and a few other farmers in the area. There’s a demand. All those people in the cities like you, wanting their eggs from happy chickens, wanting their meat grass-fed and humanely slaughtered.”
She shook her head on the last two words. It was a point we agreed on, but for cosmically different reasons.
“Where is this coming from, Mary? You know Elsa’s not going to last the year.”
She flinched at the words and I backpedaled, lowering my voice.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it like that, but it’s obvious the doctor was right. She’s weaker every day. She remembers less and less of what anyone tells her. The other day she didn’t even know who I was.”
I didn’t mention that—because she didn’t know me—she was nicer than she had been since my wedding day. She patted my hand and called me Hank and asked me to read her a few obituaries. Hank was happy to oblige. It was the first time in months I’d felt welcome in this house.
The retention-rate issue was becoming hard to ignore. She’d weakly asked Mary every day for two weeks why we’d bought “that five-dollar pepper” until it was finally drilled into her head that it was “Peter’s fancy pepper.” She watched the weather forecast on the news at least two times a night and still acted surprised when it snowed the next day. If the oxygen wasn’t sufficiently reaching her brain anymore, how much longer could the rest of her body survive?