ASH WEDNESDAY by Jacqueline Keren
They ate everything. Bonnie was never hungry. Coffee killed her appetite. When she smoked, her brain idled before she was off again to the next chore.
She stood in front of the refrigerator and the pictures on the door stared back at her, Kaleb, a lopsided face, like his father, the right eye smaller than the left, Kayla, like her, a round, sunflower face. Hands in the air, their mouths cavernous.
A jar of pickles in the fridge.
The baby slept. His breezy breath, warm and wet as she held him to her chest. Kayla weighed more than Bonnie did, huffing when she ran, yet she was a little thing, barely reaching Bonnie’s shoulders. They followed her around the kitchen when she lugged in the groceries – babbling about school, the beach, grandparents – and ate everything the day she bought it.
A box of cereal on the counter. She shook it. Dust.
She took her pill, a frozen ball of crystal. Her ex had taught her to pack the meth into pellets she stored in the freezer. One pop per day. He was applying for a patent, he said. He was an entrepreneur, not the loser she said he was. The speed kicked in gradually, and she ran faster than all the things that needed to be done in the morning. The good feeling was good enough.
They sat on the couch, Kayla pulling on her socks. Bonnie’s toes scrunched the thick carpet as if they were digging to China. They got busy after she took her pill. Her feet tingled with the electricity she generated.
“Mom,” Kayla said. “Your toes are going crazy.”
She leaned against her daughter, and when they collided, Kayla’s hair rose in an airy fan. A transfer of energy, mother to daughter. Kayla would do well today. Bonnie sang, “Come and meet my dancing feet.”
Kayla giggled. Kaleb stood in the doorway. If only he scowled, but his face was flat. A quiet boy. A somber boy. At night, he sat at the kitchen table flying through his homework while she and Kayla labored over her assignments. Bonnie’s arm a half moon around her daughter’s shoulders. When Kayla pressed her pencil to the paper, she kissed the silky side of her head.
She scuffed outside in her slippers as the bus rounded the corner and waddled down their block. The kids boarded, and as the bus bounced away, they waved from the back windows. For a quick moment, Kaleb smiled. She lifted her hand, patted the baby’s back.
She pulled on a sweater. It was just the two of them and the errands. She couldn’t go to the store in her slippers, not like the cows from Pill Hill who shopped in their pajamas. In her shoes, her wiggly toes would rub, blister, bleed. She wrapped them in duct tape and pulled on her sneakers.
She turned off the coffee machine, flicked the lights, twisted the knobs on the stove. The pilot light clicked, the blue flame shivering. She snuffed it out. Check, check, check.
She strapped the baby into the car seat and tossed the stroller into the trunk. Someday she’d take him somewhere: across the bridge, into the mountains, a long road with a rest stop.
She circled the grocery store parking lot before pulling in between a pickup truck and a white van. A rocket jetting across the van’s side pierced a thicket of grey clouds, on course for the nebula of a swirling drain. Space Plumber. She killed the engine and rested in the warm bubble of the car. A knot of people descended the steps of the church as the organ moaned. Even from across the street, she could see the black smudges on their foreheads. They were heading toward the Miss Port Archer Diner. A woman pushing a shopping cart, a mattress balanced across it, panicked in the middle of the road and straddled the orange line as the cars rolled by until someone took pity and slowed to a stop. The sun cleared the top of the grocery store, and Bonnie closed her eyes against the piercing brightness. She clutched her shoulder bag, inside, her shopping list and the vouchers from the county. Time to brave the store, collect what she needed. She scratched her scalp, picking at a scab. She closed her eyes and tried to see ahead in time: she’d fill her basket, wait in line. Her turn to pay. The checkout line would lengthen while the clerk processed the vouchers, punching in the long, secret codes, and the cows, massing behind her, huffed and puffed. She started, her eyes snapping open. The sun had risen another notch. She wiped the drool from her chin and kneaded the strap of her shoulder bag. Always this exhaustion before the pill kicked into high gear. A warm wind stirred through the window. She shucked off her sweater. It was a gift, a day in March like May.
She popped open the stroller then got to work on the baby, undoing the buckles and straps of the car seat, only to set him in the vinyl sling and snap him up all over again. She slung her shoulder bag over the handles of the stroller. She wheeled with one hand, the other, flung by her side, propelling her across the parking lot to her destination. Shoppers wheeled their carts behind the big windows. A silent movie, and she was making her entrance. The manager stood near the door. Was he watching her? She swerved, crossing the street to peer inside the windows of the diner. Two men sat at the counter. Space Plumber hunched over a plate streaked with yellow. He was a godsend, her mother said, a plumber who answered the phone during hunting season. Next to him sat his assistant whom the wicked old ladies who occupied the booths weekday mornings called Crack Harbor. Breakfast was winding down. The lunch rush an hour away at least. A window of time when she would be tolerated. She rifled through her bag and found the envelope with the vouchers but no wallet. She closed her eyes and rewound through the morning, back to her kitchen, where she floated like a spirit under the table, over the counters and into the drawers. The dishwasher? The oven? The wallet was somewhere, but it was hidden.
She sat at the far end of the counter, near the kitchen, separated from the two men by a line of empty stools, their polished wooden surfaces reflecting the sun. In the booths, the women, black crosses on their foreheads, cackled. How much did she owe? Nothing. She was paid up. She’d ask Katrinka to start a new tab, but that girl was hard. She’d say “no” before she could go above her head to the owner.
A new girl set a mug of coffee in front of her. A tattoo ran across the “v” of her shirt: Knock ’em dead.
“Where’s Katrinka?” she asked.
“Day off.”
The baby gurgled, his toothless mouth an oval of delight. The girl cooed, the same unfocused openness in her eyes, the same search for goodness in everything she encountered.
“Hey.”
The waitress glanced up at her.
“I’d like two eggs, poached. Tell him to put a little maple syrup in the water. White toast. I’ll butter it myself.”
The girl scribbled away then ran the ticket into the kitchen. A spatula scraping across the grill screeched to a stop. The owner leaned his grey head out the door. “Bonnie?”
A question. She’d cleared her account at the beginning of the month. She answered with a question of her own. “Tab?”
His eyes were the pale blue of the sky as the sun rose. “That’s it for the week.” His gaze shifted down the counter to Space Plumber. Something passed between them, a thought that sailed above her head, the sound trailing, and she ran after it until it faded away.
“For sure,” she said while the girl filled her mug with a bitter stream of coffee. “And juice for the baby,” she said. “And a straw.”
The waitress nodded before running the coffee pot down to the booths where the women crowed.
The girl, returning with the coffee pot, leaned in as she refilled Bonnie’s cup and peered sideways down the counter. “They have marks on their foreheads,” she whispered.
“What?” Bonnie saw burns, bullet holes, thumb prints before she collected the pieces, the people streaming from the church, organ music on a weekday morning, the onset of Lent. “Ash Wednesday.”
The girl gazed at her, her eyes big and brown and empty.
“You know what that is?”
She brightened. “A Jewish thing?”
Bonnie laughed, a throaty cough. The baby caught his breath and gurgled. A screech from the old ladies. “You’re something,” she said.
The girl frowned, her brows knotted. Was she going to cry?
“I’m a Baptist,” the girl said.
Bonnie patted her hand. She pointed out the window at the church. “A Catholic thing,” she said. Her arm slid across the street, “Presbyterian,” and down the hill, “Methodist,” before waving vaguely west at the old mines and the tailing piles, where the Baptists met in the minister’s house. “You.” She sighed. “Don’t worry about it.”
The girl nodded as Bonnie’s plate slid out from the kitchen.
The yolks, when she punctured them, bled sunrise- orange across the plate. She staunched the flow with her toast and pinched off a bit for the baby. Everything tasted like dust. She set her fork down just to smell the butter- crisped edges and fried potatoes. When she was a kid, they had come here on the Sunday mornings when she woke to her father’s big rig in the driveway. She ran outside in her pajamas and climbed into the cab, where he slept on the bench behind the front seat. Sleep came quickly, he said, when he was parked at a rest stop. One yank of the horn and he was crawling out of his sleeping bag and buttoning his flannel shirt. If he didn’t show up, they ate out anyway. Her mother pulled the waitress aside as they were leaving, and they waited outside by the claw foot tub, overflowing with purple petunias, until the wheels the diner once rode on began to spin and steam billowed from the wells as it had in the days when it rolled from factory to factory, her mother explained.
When she was done, she knocked on the counter. “End of the month,” she hollered into the kitchen. Her knuckles throbbed, her skin as thin as tissue paper. She was almost at the door when the girl called, “The baby!” They gaped at her, the girl and Space Plumber and the old ladies. She was only headed to the bathroom. She returned for the stroller and pushed him in with her. She sat on the toilet, tickling the baby. See? Not forgotten. A wooden wardrobe guarded him while she washed her hands and when she was done, she buried a roll of toilet paper in her shoulder bag and covered it with the baby’s blanket. She would give up thieving for Lent.
She pushed the stroller across the parking lot, pausing before the grocery store to claw through her hair. When she found the scab, she picked at the edges, whittling away the island of dried blood. She scraped the red flakes from beneath her nails. The baby gurgled. She closed her eyes and combed the house again for her wallet. The bureau, the bedroom, the hallway table. This time, she found it on the kitchen counter between a box of cereal and a soda bottle. Kayla adored bubbly drinks. Some days, Bonnie could see Kayla grow with each vigorous tug on her straw.
The wallet was empty. She could see that in her mind. That left the vouchers with all their rules. The cashier sorting through her purchases. The cows snorting. What if she picked up the wrong kind of milk and the line grew while she ran for the right one? Cash was quicker. A card was easy. It was only the middle of the month, and she was nearly tapped out. Weeks before the next infusion. When it pinged on her card, they would celebrate. Sunday breakfast at the diner. Steak and eggs for everyone. During the week, the kids ate breakfast and lunch at school. Fish sticks for dinner. Banana for the baby.
She rolled the stroller around the village, the streets unfurling in a familiar pattern: house, house, church, repeat. Only the style of church varied. The melting snow had left thick drifts of sand in the gutters that she forced the wheels of the stroller through. She slowed in front of a house where a woman sat on her porch, feathered hair greying at the temples, a black blotch on her forehead. A Jewish thing. Dumb girl. Mrs. Deroche stroked the dog in her lap. Her dark eyes rested on Bonnie. A bicycle wheeled by and the dog leapt into action. Mrs. Deroche waited a few heartbeats before she called, “Nipper! Nipper!” and the dog retreated into her lap. Bonnie was the same age as her daughter who drove around town in an enormous SUV to collect the dead for the county.
She rocked the stroller back and forth, the wheels scraping.
“Yes, Bonnie?”
She dragged her foot through the sand. “Can I use your bathroom?” she asked.
Mrs. Deroche’s smile evaporated, leaving behind a tight line. A heartbeat or two before she nodded. She would allow her in to use the toilet and no more, once and never again. If Bonnie were in her shoes, would she have made the same choice? Never.
She followed the train of the old woman’s bathrobe, the darkened hem gliding over the floor, on a path cut through stacks of magazines and children’s games. She left her the baby to coo at.
She ran the tap while she rummaged through the medicine cabinet. Baby aspirin, Q-tips, tweezers, blush. Her underarms were hot and damp, and she swiped them with a stick of deodorant. On the bottom row, the orange bottles with their smart white labels. Pills for problems, pills for pain. She gleaned her record: her heart beat too fast, she ate too many sweets. Bonnie suffered, too. Her neck ached from sleeping on a flattened pillow, her toes strained against their binding. Her mother told her to slow down, but the dishes and laundry and dusting fought for her attention. She crammed two bottles into her pockets. The old lady wasn’t using them. Why else would she have so many?
She wore a gleaming smile back to the living room.
The old lady eyed her. “You left the faucet running,” she said.
She felt the frown rising to the surface but tamped it down before galloping back to the bathroom. One last glance at the medicine cabinet and its hidden treasures, her sallow reflection in the mirror, her teeth not as sparkly as she imagined. Should she try her luck? What luck?
“Don’t forget the baby,” the woman called as she hurried to the front door.
She grabbed the stroller, wrestled it through the entryway and down the steps.
She wandered through the streets to a hill overlooking the lake. The sun beamed through the bare trees and warmed her skin. A truck drove onto the ice and parked near a fishing shack, smoke billowing from the chimney. On his rare stops at home, her father had fished. In time, she lost track of the days without him, and what did it matter? She’d preserved a memory of him in his cab, like a Ball jar of dilly beans or pickled eggs. When the baby was old enough for school, she would meander through the shacks scattered around the icy bay, pausing to rest in one before heading out on the road on the opposite shore. The baby burbled. He had the look that warned of red- faced squealing, a mood only motion could quell.
She posted on the website for the county tag sale: for sale! The name, copied carefully from the label of Mrs. Deroche’s pill bottle. She waited and when nothing happened, pulled a chair out onto the stoop. The baby was napping. Her neighbor across the street, sitting on her porch, waved as a car went by. An old man walked his dog down the sidewalk. Then no one, except the egg yolk sun pulsing on her head. The sweat made her scalp itch. The idleness made her toes ache, but when the first people arrived, her toes rested. In less than an hour, the first bottle was empty. The cash in her hand was enough to buy spring clothes for the kids.
A man wandered by late, his pale yellow dog trailing behind him. “I’m going to the reservation,” he said.
The dog sniffed her hand before squatting beside his master. She held out a ten dollar bill. “Pick me up some cigarettes?”
He ruffled the bill, held it up to the sun, then slipped it into his hip pocket.
“What’s your commission?” she asked.
“Ten percent.”
The usual. She picked at her scab while he idled on the sidewalk. The dog wagged its tail.
“I saw you on the computer,” he said.
“On the tag sale?”
“On Google maps, right where you are now.”
“I’m always here.” Every morning, every afternoon.
He glanced at his dog and nodded. “You were here the day the Google car drove by.”
She tapped her front teeth. She read the goings-on online, the prayers and accusations, the blessings and family feuds, but she hadn’t noticed the eye that looked back at her as if she were a piece of the scenery, like a street sign rattled by the wind off the lake. “So?”
He shrugged as he strolled away, the dog loping beside him.
She was heading inside when a woman turned up her path, her face overrun by her owly sunglasses, her long, black hair tangled in a rat’s nest. The wind blew her cardigan open. Her blouse was stained, coffee and ketchup. When she worked at the Dollar Store, scanning toilet paper and toothpaste, she was tidier. One day, when Bonnie was buying milk and cheese, she came upon a pair of fuzzy slippers. When she’d slipped her feet into the roomy toe box, her toes rested, but relief lasted only a moment before they were running again. This woman had found her in tears in the aisle. After she explained, the woman bought her a roll of duct tape. A miracle. She could wear shoes again without beating her forehead and scratching her head. That was before the woman’s son had died. They had buried him on a colder day than this one. She had sported the sunglasses ever since. Bonnie was grateful that she did.
She gave her a deal, three pills for $15. “Will you have more?” the woman asked.
A good salesman guaranteed a steady supply. “I hope so.”
Space Plumber’s van was still in the parking lot when she returned to the grocery store, and she slid in beside it. Was he working nearby or slurping coffee? With the cash crumpled in her pocket, the doors parted for her. She shook a cart free of the clump and drove it toward the rainbow mounds of produce. She held a cantaloupe to her nose, the skin roughing her cheek, and inhaled the sweet, caramel scent. Music floated through the aisles: “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” The speckled yellow squares of linoleum a path through this cornucopia.. When she touched her toe to the first square, she felt the pull of all the plenty. She wrapped her hands around the metal handle of the cart, cold despite the plastic grip, and glided on. The store hummed, the muffled purr of machinery. Formula, milk, orange juice, diapers. She grabbed a loaf of bread by the waist. Soda and chips. An apple and a banana for the baby.
A crooked line stretched from the register to the beach ball display. Summer, the kids underfoot, desperate for things to do. She tossed a ball into her cart. They’d sit at the beach, squeal as they scampered in and out of the lake. The baby with a shovel, maybe even a bucket, sand clinging to his pudgy legs.
Someone joined the line behind her, set his basket at his feet and kicked it when the line crept forward. As it scraped across the floor, her head began to pound. She turned. Space Plumber, a gallon of milk in his hand, a blotch on his broad forehead, rested his eyes upon her. He had answered her mother’s call one spring when the sump pump broke and the cellar flooded, and he waded through the water to install a new pump, dolls and Christmas ornaments and ancient atlases floating in the current.
“What are you giving up for Lent?” he asked.
“Smoking,” she said.
“Brave.”
Even with the light pouring through the windows, the store was cold. The line crept forward, a snake in the sun. Her toes began to tingle. She’d cry if she couldn’t free them soon. Space Plumber cleared his throat. His gaze had shifted to her hands. She wiped her palms on her pants, then held her hands up for inspection. A heart line and a life line but otherwise empty.
A song from forever ago wafted from the ceiling. “I want candy.” A children’s chorus. When they got older, they’d see how little they needed.
Space Plumber studied her. “Didn’t you forget something again?” he asked.
Were all godsends so nosey? She shook her purse; her keys jingled. The vouchers silent. The cash crammed tightly into her pocket. Her face was warm, the tips of her ears on fire. She had everything. Everything but the baby.
She closed her eyes, retraced her steps to the car, where she found him, strapped inside his seat. It was only March, the day a blue surprise, the kind you prayed for in February. How long had he sat there? A minute? Five? The sun was lukewarm. The temperature could only rise so high.
All but one of the numbered signs above the registers were dark. They’d closed their eyes to her. She drew in her breath. How long since she’d filled her lungs, saturated herself? She lived on little gulps of air that withered away before they opened the wings of her lungs. She needed more to accomplish this task. She sucked in all the air she occupied and her lips cracked as she opened her mouth and shouted, “Can’t someone else open?” What every penitent wanted to know when the line stretched to the horizon. “My baby is in the car.” Her throat throbbed. The tasks were many before she could get back to him. She cradled her head in her hands.
Someone pinched her elbow. She looked into Space Plumber’s eyes. “Let me help you,” he said. His grip was firm as he steered her to the customer service desk where the manager was waiting. A kind of miracle.
Space Plumber emptied her cart onto the counter, boxes and bags and bouncing apples. All the bar codes facing up.
The scanner bleeped. “Give me your SNAP card,” the manager said. “And your WIC vouchers. Cash for the junk food.”
She shook her head, like she was shaking the water out of her ear, clearing away the jumble of thoughts colliding in her brain. The car, the windows, the baby. She was losing the plot. When she looked backwards in time, she saw static, the fuzz of a broken signal. How could she find her way forward when the past was distorted?
She opened her bag. Keys, lip balm, crackers. Still no wallet. She wrestled with the envelope. Empty. All day she had thought the vouchers were with her and, despite all the trouble they caused – the lines, the questions – ready to fulfill their purpose. Like her wallet, they played a game of hide and seek. Now was not the time.
“I’ll finish up here,” Space Plumber said. “Go.”
The manager glanced through the windows at the sun beating down on the cars.
Her throat was raw. Her toes ached. It was too much to thank him, too much to go.
She went.
Space Plumber’s van threw a cool shadow across the car. The baby, asleep, his skin cool when she brushed his cheek. She had cracked a window. She had done it instinctively. Of course she had.
She was sitting on the stoop, a cigarette pursed between her fingers, when the school bus deposited the kids in front of the house. Kayla ran to her, huffing, a backpack swinging from her shoulders. She waved a piece of paper, a scrawl of numbers running down it. “I passed,” she shouted. No one from school had called; no fists that day.
To celebrate, they strolled down the hill to the hotdog stand. Kayla read the menu posted between the take out windows. “Dog, dog, dog,” she barked. Kayla and Kaleb ordered Michigans, the meaty sauce soaking into the roll. The baby bunched an empty hotdog roll in his hand. Kayla barked a thank you. The woman at the counter, ash on her forehead, scowled and shook her head.
Bonnie pressed her forehead to the glass. “Problem?” she asked.
The woman held out her big, broad hand.
Money. That was always the problem.
After the kids had gone to bed and the baby had fallen asleep, she swallowed the one pill she had saved, and she was warm and light and liquid. She could hear her mother scolding her, “This is how it starts.” Her mother had risen every morning for work. Paid every bill. She had taught her discipline. It would be only one. The refrigerator hummed, sending mechanical messages to the other appliances. She took off her shoes. Her toes struggled against the tape, creatures with their own desires. She ripped off the tape, and her toes went to work, breaking the old blisters. She sat at the computer, called up a picture of her street, narrowing in on her block and her house, where she sat on the stoop in her jean shorts. The wind was blowing her hair up in twisted strands when the car with the camera rolled by, mapping her. She was talking to an invisible someone, one of the kids or their father who had no money to give her. What did he live on when he had nothing to share?
The phone rang, her ex’s mother. “I saw what you posted,” she said. “I’m taking you to court. You’re going to lose that baby.”
The baby wasn’t lost. She knew just where he was. She retraced her day to find the thing that had offended the old cow but got stuck at the stoop, the surprising sun on her face, a pause in her wanderings, a figure at a rest stop.
Jacqueline Keren’s work has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Calyx Journal, Confrontation, and Redivider.