The Best American Short Stories 2018 Read online

Page 34


  In the kitchen, Casey is dumping mayonnaise into a large clear bowl, onto chunks of canned tuna.

  “Melts?” Kirsten says by way of greeting, and Casey nods. As Kirsten washes her hands, Casey says, “Will you pull out the salad ingredients? There’s a yellow pepper.”

  “I appreciate your getting Ian’s violin.”

  “We need to be better organized in the morning,” Casey says. “I’m setting my alarm for fifteen minutes earlier tomorrow.”

  “O.K.” After a pause, Kirsten says, “Did you hear that Lucy Headrick came out on The Mariana Show? Or whatever coming out is called if it’s retroactive.”

  “Who’s Lucy Headrick again?”

  Oh, to be Casey! Calm and methodical, with a do-gooder job. To be a person who isn’t frittering away her life having vengeful thoughts about people from her past! It happens that Casey is both a former farm girl, of the authentic kind—she grew up in Flandreau, South Dakota—and a gold-star lesbian. She and Kirsten met thirteen years ago, at the Christmas-caroling party of a mutual friend. Kirsten got very drunk and climbed onto Casey’s lap during “Good King Wenceslas,” and that night she stayed over at Casey’s apartment.

  “Lucy Headrick is the Prairie Wife,” Kirsten says. “She just wrote a book.”

  “Got it,” Casey says.

  “She was actually very eloquent. And her fans are definitely the kind of people who are still bigots.”

  “Good for her.”

  “Are you pissed at me?”

  “No,” Casey says. “But I’m trying to get dinner on the table.”

  Kirsten puts the boys to bed, then lies down in the master bedroom and looks at her phone. It’s difficult to estimate what portion of the tweets Lucy has received this afternoon are ugly—they’re mixed in with “Yay for standing your truth Lucy!” and “I love you no matter what!!!” Maybe a third?

  “why u like to eat pussy did u ever try a hard cock”

  “You are A LESBIAN ADULTERER. You are DISGUSTING + BAD for AMERICA!!!!!”

  “Romans 1:26 two women is ‘against nature.’”

  Quickly, before she can talk herself out of it, Kirsten types, “I thought you were very brave today.” After hitting Tweet, she feels a surge of adrenaline and considers deleting the message, but for whose benefit? Her three bots’? In any case, Lucy hasn’t tweeted since before noon, and Kirsten wonders if she’s gone on a Twitter hiatus.

  In the summer, Kirsten and Casey usually watch TV together after the boys are asleep, but during the school year Casey works in the den—responding to parents’ emails, reading books about how educators can recognize multiple kinds of intelligence. Sometimes she keeps a baseball or a football game on mute, and the sports further deter Kirsten from joining her. Thus, almost every night, Kirsten stays upstairs, intending to fold laundry or call her mother while actually fucking around on her phone. At 9:45, she texts Casey “Going to bed,” and Casey texts back “Gnight hon,” followed by a sleeping-face emoji with “zzz” above the closed eyes. This is their nightly exchange, and, every night, for about four seconds, Kirsten ponders Casey’s choice of the sleeping-face emoji versus something more affectionate, like the face blowing a kiss, or just a heart.

  While brushing her teeth, Kirsten receives a text from Frank: “Bitch did u see this?” There’s a link to what she’s pretty sure is a Prairie Wife article, and she neither clicks on it nor replies.

  She is still awake, in the dark, when Casey comes upstairs almost an hour later, uses the bathroom, and climbs into bed without turning on the light; Kirsten rarely speaks to Casey at this juncture and always assumes that Casey thinks she’s asleep. But tonight, while curled on her side with her back to Casey, Kirsten says, “Did you sign Ian’s permission slip for the field trip to the science museum?”

  “Yeah, it was due last Friday.”

  “Oh,” Kirsten says. “Imagine that.”

  They’re both quiet as Casey settles under the blankets, then she says, “Did the prairie lady mention you on TV?”

  “I probably would have told you if she had.”

  “Good point.” Unexpectedly, Casey leans over and kisses Kirsten’s cheek. She says, “Well, no matter what, I owe her a debt of gratitude for initiating you.”

  For some reason, Kirsten tears up. She swallows, so that she won’t sound as if she’s crying, and says, “Do you really feel that way, or are you joking?”

  “Do you think you’d have dated women if she hadn’t hit on you behind the arts-and-crafts shed?”

  “And your life is better because you ended up with me?”

  Casey laughs. “Who else would I have ended up with?”

  “Lots of people. Someone less flaky and petty.”

  “I like your flakiness and pettiness.”

  Kirsten starts crying harder, though still not as hard as Frank was crying at the bar. But enough that Casey becomes aware of it and scoots toward Kirsten, spooning her from behind.

  “Baby,” Casey says. “Why are you sad?”

  “This will sound self-centered,” Kirsten says. “But Lucy was really into me. I’m sure it was partly because I wasn’t that into her, and I wasn’t even playing hard to get. I just—” She pauses.

  “What?” Casey says.

  “I know we have a good life,” Kirsten says. “And the boys—they’re amazing. They amaze me every day. Did I tell you, when we were at the mall last weekend Jack wanted to buy you this purse that was like a fake-diamond-encrusted jaguar head? Its eyes were emeralds.”

  “Oh, man,” Casey says. “I can’t wait for my birthday.”

  “It’s not that I’m jealous of Lucy Headrick because she’s a rich celebrity,” Kirsten says. “It seems awful to be famous now.” Her voice breaks as she adds, “I just wish that there was someone who was excited about me. Or that when someone was excited about me, I wish I hadn’t taken it for granted. I didn’t understand that would be the only time.”

  “Kirsten.” Casey uses her top hand to pet Kirsten’s hip.

  “I don’t blame you for not finding me exciting,” Kirsten says. “Why would you?”

  “We have full-time jobs and young kids,” Casey says. “This is what this stage is like.”

  “But do you ever feel like you’ll spend every day slicing cucumbers for lunchboxes and going to work and driving to Little League on the weekend and then you’ll look up and twenty years will have passed?”

  “God willing,” Casey says. She moves both her arms up so she’s cupping Kirsten’s breasts over her pajama top. “Do you want me to pretend to be Lucy at camp? Or Lucy now? Do you want me to make you a chocolate soufflé?”

  “Soufflé is too French,” Kirsten says. “Lucy would make apple pie.”

  They’re both quiet, and, weirdly, this is where the conversation ends, or maybe, given that it’s past eleven and Casey’s alarm is set for six-fifteen or possibly for six, it isn’t weird at all. They don’t have sex. They don’t reach any resolutions. But, for the first time in a while, Kirsten falls asleep with her wife’s arms around her.

  In the middle of the night, because she can’t help herself, Kirsten checks to see if Lucy has responded to her tweet; so far, there’s nothing.

  Rivers Solomon

  Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver

  from Emrys Journal

  My kid walks down Blue Street Diner’s central aisle before slumping into a booth near the toilets. She’s on meds that make her urinate nonstop and requires round-the-clock access to the facilities. Her words.

  “The name of the drug is spironolactone, if you’re wondering,” she’d said on our pre-meeting phone call. “Also, I’m trans. The name you gave me is dead and incinerated and I spread its ashes over the Hudson. Say it to my face, and you’ll meet the same fate. I’m Luciana now. Or Luz.”

  “You mean trans, like, you’re transsexual?”

  “Trans like gender is dead. When can we meet? Should I call you Mom or Jo?”

  “Jo’s fine
,” I’d said, though I find that name embarrassingly predictable in retrospect. It’s a name I picked for myself after reading Little Women, obsessed, like so many little girls, with the bookish, tomboyish heroine. I should have gone for Beth, or better yet, Amy or Meg.

  “Luciana. I really like that. She’s only a minor figure in Catch-22, but something about her kind of sticks with you. Good choice,” I said.

  “Whatever. I was just trying to think of a girl version of Lucifer.”

  I meet her at Blue Street Diner because I’ve never been. Seemed appropriate to reunite with my stranger of a daughter on neutral ground.

  An employee busses tables, pocketing pennies and dollar bills left under jars of Dijon mustard. The screams of a toddler fill the background. For my part there’s some throat clearing, a few aborted questions. Every few seconds I venture a glance in Luciana’s direction. This is the first time I’ve seen my daughter since shortly after she was born, and I am admittedly overwhelmed.

  I keep one hand tucked into my handbag, palm secured around the handle of my revolver, ready to shoot if this girl, my child, has re-entered my life in order to harm me in some way, to exact vengeance because I chose to leave her in the care of the state.

  Giving up on conversation, I hum the old bluegrass tune “Whiskey Before Breakfast” as I page through the menu. It’s the first song I taught myself on the fiddle, slowly and painfully, when I decided I did not belong to my parents after all and wanted to travel to the South in a caravan.

  Mr. Wheelock, Luciana’s father, always wanted me to listen to blues and jazz. He said as a black girl I had no business not knowing Muddy Waters or Billie Holiday, but the fast-paced string melodies of country folk songs spoke to my youthful mania. I told him that as a white man, he had no business not knowing the Osborne Brothers or the Foggy Mountain Boys. Besides, black folks invented country and bluegrass, so I was just going back to the source.

  That’s when he told me that I was the most mature young woman he’d ever met. If he’d known then that he’d be dead at my own hands, would he have introduced himself to me that first time? Or would he have gone for another girl? Prone toward awkwardness, I like to think that maybe I was too pretty to resist, that were he able to do it again, he’d choose me knowing I’d murder him.

  I suppose that’s why I hated him most—that he found me pretty, and that made me want him. That he knew that and used it. The things an ugly black girl from Brooklyn will do to feel pretty. She’ll dismantle her soul, if it’s required.

  “Can I get you guys started with some drinks?” a man says, holding a pen and pad of paper at me and Luz’s table.

  “Coffee,” I say. “Says here you guys use a percolator, right? A stove top one?”

  “Yeah, miss. And it’s fresh, too.”

  “Cookies and cream milkshake, please,” says Luciana. The waiter scribbles down our order before leaving. “What’s a percolator?” Luciana asks.

  “You serious?” I say.

  “I mean I’m assuming it’s something that percolates, but I could do with a more precise definition.”

  When Luciana first walked up the diner, I wondered how much her personality would match up with her appearance. A good deal of it, it turns out. Her hair, coarse red threads that tangle and twist in on each other, contrasts sharply against her noncommittally brown skin, and the effect is overall very striking. She’s got a wide jaw and a wide nose, big lips, like mine. Mascara and eyeliner. Rouge. She’s cute in a kind of dykey way, and I wonder if she’s gay like me. At least I passed down that gift.

  The morning after meeting Luz at the diner, I notice frost for the first time on the grass. Autumn is here. The curious chortles of chirping birds are absent. They’ve gone south by now, abandoned upstate New York for Florida, like old rich white people tired of the cold. Flying to warmer climates when the weather turns foul, it’s a pleasant notion. Back in the City, I suspect, New Yorkers are holding fiercely on to the season of sun, beach, and Italian ice. Flip-flops until Halloween, at least.

  I remember Mr. Wheelock at about this time of the year buying me a ham and cheese sandwich on a soft white roll at the bodega, preparing us for a picnic on the beach. We’d watch West Indian men play dominoes and backgammon, ignoring the brisk breeze, holding fast on to what was left of September.

  See, Coney Island is in decline, preparing for hibernation, and we enjoy a final day. He buys me hot dogs and funnel cakes and cotton candy. I tell him about my dreams, and he tells me I can do anything. He kisses me here, for the first time, a tentative thing that still manages to be sloppy, intrusive. I wonder if this is how it’s supposed to feel. I wonder if I’m supposed to gag, to want to run to the bin and hurl. People stare, but no one says anything because people are people. I see their faces. I know their thoughts. “She can’t be more than fourteen.” I was twelve.

  Mr. Wheelock tells me, “Don’t you worry. I’ll take care of you,” after he finishes the kiss. He smiles smugly to anyone who tries to look down on him.

  This is how I always remember him.

  “It’s cold,” says Luz. She’s moved in. That’s why she got in touch. Eighteen years old, she’s been coughed out the throat of social services onto the street.

  “Knock much?” I ask.

  “Sorry, I was bored. And I’m cold. Can you turn the heat up or something?”

  “If you got turn-the-heat-up money,” I say. “Here, wear that.” There’s a sweatshirt from my college hanging from one of the knobs on my dresser. Fleece-lined. Real thick.

  She pulls it on over her chubby body, but it still hangs nice and loose. “Put on some socks or something,” I say.

  “I don’t have any.”

  “What?”

  “It was literally just summer, I don’t know,” she tells me, pouting. All her bravado from our pre-meeting is gone. She looks like a little girl with her arms crossed over her chest.

  “We should go shopping,” I say.

  “Oh. So you got shopping money?” Luciana shoots back.

  “Ok, a pack of socks is cheaper than heating this drafty-ass Victorian, smartass. Go clean yourself up so we can get out of here. We can even see a movie or whatever if you want.”

  Luciana shrugs and leaves, then I remove a gun from my bedside table. When I go to the city, I always take her with me. She’s a brass and steel Smith and Wesson that clicks soothingly when cocked. A metal machine. A perfect contraption.

  I’ve had this thing since I was fourteen. The wooden handle, simultaneously slick with polish and rough with overuse, contains my initials. Mr. Wheelock etched them with his carving knife, giving me the relic on my birthday. Intricate engravings, curls and loops like flowering vines, cover the barrel, cylinder, and frame.

  Over two pounds she weighs. It felt like rocking an infant child when I first held the revolver in my hands. There’s weight to it.

  “Is that real?” Luciana asks. She’s burst into my room without invitation again. If she’s going to stay here, I need to get locks. This is one of Wheelock’s old places, left to me in a trust, and it’s nice but needs modernizing.

  “Old as hell but works just the same. I practice with her every week at the range. She never fails me.”

  “Why do you have it out?” she asks. “Shouldn’t that be behind lock and key? Or some glass display case? Are you an assassin?”

  “I carry her with me whenever I go into the City. Just in case.”

  “Just in case what?” she says. She crosses her hands across her chest in a way that reminds me so much of my indignant, younger self, I almost cry on the spot.

  “Just in case I need to kill someone,” I say. “You should get a piece, too. I have eleven, most of them antiques, but a few modern enough for a kid like you. You can try one out. Revolvers are best because they don’t jam, but a baby Glock will serve you well as long as you practice.”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone,” she says, and I tell her that she’ll change her mind about that. “You don’t
know shit about me. You don’t know what’s been done to me. You don’t think I ain’t been through some shit? Doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to kill.”

  “Even if it’s you or them? You’d spare their life even if it was certain you’d lose your own?” I ask.

  “Shut up!” she shouts, and walks out the room, slams the door. Gentle, tender, baby thing. My fledgling. Softer than me but just as bitter.

  I want to tell her—know this:

  The world plays out as games of power, who has it, who doesn’t. An invisible puppeteer pulls the strings of each person’s life, determining her fate based on race, gender, religion. Luz got a particularly unfortunate set of strings.

  Imagine a large man gifted with athleticism and strength, favored in life because of his class and wealth and color. Now imagine a child, young and poor and thoroughly pathetic. See the two of them together, in a room, butting heads.

  Now imagine the scene again, but this time the child has a gun, and the man does not. He steps back, suddenly fearful of her scrawny figure, her shaking frame, her tearing eyes. Everyone fears the bullet, no matter what gift the invisible puppeteer has bestowed upon him.

  Something with that much weight in this world is to be saved and savored, so even though I was an anti-gun progressive when Mr. Wheelock handed me my gift, I could not say no to the revolver when I felt its heaviness in my hand.

  He never knew the exact date on it, but said that it no doubt dated to the Civil War era and was likely used for an elite officer on the side of the Union. “Of course, you’ll never shoot anyone with it,” he said.

  The wind sweeps through the valley quiet-like and unassuming, animating the leaves and branches of the trees. The maples and the birches dance with soul. Like the women in Baptist churches who holler and scream ’cause they think they are filled with the Holy Ghost.

  I go here before every trip into New York, even in winter. It’s my portal. My wardrobe.

  I like to watch the trees shimmy as I sit on the edge of the river bank, feet in the water, butt in the wet clay, wishing for a water moccasin to come my way so I can shoot the creature dead. I’ll watch it wiggle. Watch it convulse and carry on after I put bullets into its spiraling body.