American War(96)

A plate sat on the kitchen counter, piled with fried eggs fresh from the coop my mother kept near the rows of our numbered greenhouses, as well as asparagus from House Six and strips of real Virginia bacon.

“Fair enough,” my father said. “I’m not asking you to wait on her. Just treat her as if she was your family.”

“That’s not fair.” I could see my mother getting angry. She had a habit of digging her thumbnails into the skin of her middle fingers when her patience stretched. “I married you, didn’t I? She is my family.”

My father recoiled a little, surprised that my mother had taken offense. He was least clouded at the start of the day, least likely to forget or repeat himself, but most often he suffered from an inability to predict how the things he said sounded to ears other than his own.

“I’ll take it to her,” I said, stepping into the kitchen.

My parents looked at me, and then each other.

“Sure, why not?” said my father. “She’s your aunt—go ahead.”

Triumphant, I took the plate. The kitchen counter was a buttercream marble veined with black, and I had just that year grown tall enough to reach it. On my way out I took an oatmeal cookie from the jar on the table and set it on the plate. It seemed incomprehensible to me that so little food could possibly satisfy a body so big.

At the shed I found the doors slightly ajar. I wedged my hips between them and budged them open. Inside, the old prewar bulb was still on—I could feel the heat of it—even though sunlight seeped in through a thousand cracks in the wood. The air smelled of dust and mothballs and the wetness of recently disturbed earth. It also smelled of her.

She was still sleeping, her frame curled into something like a question mark upon a space in the floor where there was no floor—as though the very foundations of the shed had backed away from her quietly in the night. She was snoring and the thumb of her right hand twitched.

As slow and quiet as possible, I set the plate on the workbench. An old black toolbox had been taken down from the shelves—a dust outline still visible in the place where it had sat unused for years. Its contents were strewn about: a screwdriver, a set of pliers, and a folding knife. The knife had a black aluminum handle engraved with initials I couldn’t decipher. There were a few strands of hair on the blade.

I was transfixed by the knife. At home, my mother would not let me near anything with a blade, not even the butter knives whose edges were dull as soap. But something about the confines of the old musty shed made me believe that this was a wild, sovereign place, where my mother’s rule had no power. I was so mesmerized by the rust-streaked blade on the workbench, I didn’t notice when the snoring stopped.

I heard something like a sharp inhale. I dropped the knife and turned to find her on her feet—moving faster than I ever thought possible for someone of such size. Lunging.

But it was not toward me. Like a frenzied prey she darted away to the furthest corner from where I stood. She backed into the walls with such force that the shed itself shook, and I thought the whole rotting thing would come down on us.

Fear of her pulled me toward the door, but something kept me where I stood. I saw the rise and fall of her chest. She looked at me as though I had stingers for limbs.

“Breakfast!” I blurted out. “I brought you breakfast. Look, look!”

I pointed at the plate on the workbench, but she never took her eyes off me.

Slowly, she approached. When she was close to me she knelt down. She leaned in until her face was close to mine and I could feel the milky breath of the newly woken on my cheek.

“I forgot your name,” she said.

“Benjamin,” I replied. “My name’s Benjamin Chestnut.”

She took my chin in her hand and inspected my face. “You look like your father did, when he was young,” she said. “You got none of your mother in you.”

I saw that she had shaved her head, and that there were fresh cuts on her scalp.

“Why do you want to sleep here?” I asked. “It smells funny. We have lots of nice rooms in the house. My parents say you can stay there as long as you want.”

She let me go. Her eyes were red and her face stained on one side with soil. She wore the same clothes she had on when she arrived. It occurred to me then that not a single piece of clothing in our home would fit her.

“Listen very carefully to what I’m about to tell you,” she said. I nodded.

“Don’t ever come in here again.”



SHE DIDN’T LEAVE the shed until dinnertime. In those days, whenever the weather wasn’t too hot, my mother liked to have dinner in the backyard by the levee. We had a beautiful table on the deck, made of real Cascadia redwood. And although the levee blocked our view of the river, we were able to enjoy its breeze.

My mother saw her in the yard. “Come have some dinner, Sarat,” she said. “It’s a gorgeous night—don’t get too many of those anymore.”

She looked at the old plot where my mother once planted her first seeds, back when she was still the help, still an interloper.

“Look familiar, don’t it?” my mother said. “It’s from before, from the old house. You remember how you used to get me that good foreign soil? That’s all we use now, in all the greenhouses. That very same soil.”



IN THE WEEKS that followed, we settled into routine. Our guest spent most of her days and nights in the shed. Sometimes she came outside and walked among the greenhouses, but only late in the evening, when my parents were asleep. I lay awake some nights looking for her out my window.