Future Home of the Living God(28)

“Glen and Sera don’t know I’m pregnant, or they’d be here. But I told my Potts family.” And then, because I need to change the subject, I hit the table with my fist. “Phil, we need some food.”

“Right. I’ll hit a grocery store on the way back.”

“Here.”

I hand him a list of high-protein and long-shelf-life items. I’m glad I shopped when I did, but I’m nervous. I tell him we need a water filter, and he raises his eyebrows and says, “Where am I going to get this?”

“Camping supply store.” I also give him some of the money I got from the bank.

“It’s a good thing I don’t show yet,” I say. “Nobody in the neighborhood knows.”

Phil’s expression shifts; he leans across the table and cradles my face between his workman’s palms. Love builds in his face and eyes and takes away my breath.

“You show now, Cedar,” he says. “You do show. I want you to remember that. Don’t even stand in front of a window.”

*

Phil does not return and of course I can’t reach him, or my parents, or my Potts family. Cell phones locaters can’t be turned off now so Phil has buried our phones, swathed in layers of plastic, in the Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery. Sometimes the internet works, but I’ve told Phil how this Mother apparition appears and he agrees we can’t use it. My fear of leaving the house causes me to do what I do when I panic. I read and write to divert myself.

You kick, you remind me of your existence. An update. Last week you began to absorb sugar from the amniotic fluid you’ve been swallowing. Your little digestive system now can handle the sweetness. Your bone marrow’s making blood cells and taste buds are forming on your tongue. Your brain and nerve endings are mature enough to feel touches. You graze your face with a finger, suck your thumb. You’re over seven inches long and you weigh as much as four sticks of butter. If you’re a girl, you’ve just made all of the eggs you’ll need the rest of your life. If you’re a boy, you got your balls this week.

Trouble Not Loving Phil

Some men smell right and others don’t. You know what I mean if you are a woman who breathes in the fragrance of the stem end of a melon to choose it or if the odor of mock orange or lilac transfixes you or if you pass a piece of woody earth and know from a gulp of air that the soft, wet, fleshy foot of a mushroom has thrust from the earth somewhere close. Men smell good in all different ways. Salty vanilla. Hot dirt. New grass. Bitter leaf. Some are disturbingly odorless. Others dope themselves up with cologne. You can smell fear, vanity, secret meanness, a lonely heart, envy, and cruel thinking. Likewise, easy confidence. Even goodness. You can smell if a man likes you.

Phil smells as if he’s been in the sun even if he hasn’t, and he’s warmer than most people. His skin is very smooth on the tops of his arms and shoulders and chest, but his hands are callused because he likes to make things out of wood. Sometimes he smells like that clean and honest moment when a saw cuts into a board. There is a brownish gold Mediterranean undertone to all of Phil. Even his voice has that feel to it—a sunny depth. Phil is five years older than me. The first time I ever smelled Phil we were sitting in a booth in a coffee shop. Someone told me to squeeze over, and I tipped toward Phil. There was the slightly scorched odor of ironed cotton. Then the tiniest hint of sweat. I had the urge to lick his neck.

*

Phil’s not back yet.

*

Like so many Minnesota boys, Phil was raised on dairy products bearing the image of the Land O’Lakes Butter Maiden. She is the logo on the waxed cardboard one-pound butter box, a lovely, voluptuous Native girl kneeling in a lakey landscape, holding out a dish of butter. Like so many Minnesota boys, Phil folded her knees up to make breasts. He gazed at her 1/16" shadow of cleavage while eating his toast. She was a constant in his life. That night in the props room, dressed as Joseph, he confessed that after he met me, the Butter Maiden had started to haunt his dreams. She walked off the blue and yellow box in a short dress of fringed buckskin. He said she wore high-heeled leather moccasins. She looked like me. How flattering, I said, meaning the opposite. Instead of butter, she offered, in his dreams, whipped cream, sour cream, whole milk, and fresh mozzarella. That is not a Land O’Lakes product, I said to Phil. I know, but fresh mozzarella is one of my favorite foods. It’s round and slippery, he said. He told me that in his early twenties at the University of Minnesota, he majored in wildlife biology and thought he might become an ornithologist, but he had realized that in a few years there would be few birds for him to study. He would be studying the history of birds on this earth.

Phil told me that around the same time he understood this fact, his one serious relationship ended badly. He took a vow. Do no harm, to anything or anyone. Save nature. He decided to dedicate himself to preserving bird habitat, and got an advanced degree in ecology. Since then, he has tried to protect the natural world wherever possible. Without being specific, he told me that he’s gone beyond the law. He has also infiltrated some groups that he doesn’t agree with. He did this on his own, he said, because he could. I wondered, now, what that meant? Because he could? Because he was a white man with white male standing in a world where in some places that got him into those groups? When he’d taken his vow he’d struggled so hard, he said, that he thought he’d forgotten about human love.