Page 56 of Plum

“Something to make for dinner.”

“I ain’t been shopping lately.”

From the looks of her staples, she hasn’t been grocery shopping in a while. She has some peanut butter, ramen, spaghetti, potatoes in a box, and cans of soup, corn, and tuna. There’s no meat in the freezer. No fresh vegetables. She does have green bananas in a fruit bowl, so she has been grocery shopping. This is what she bought. Damn, but it reminds me of the Gilson Avenue days. My chest tightens.

“How about a peanut butter and banana sandwich?” It’s been awhile, but Cook used to make that for me when I came begging for a snack before dinner.

“That’s gross.”

“What would you like then?” I don’t see any pasta sauce. I suppose I could flavor the noodles with butter.

“A peanut butter sandwich is fine.Witha banana.”

I chuckle under my breath, and make us sandwiches. I pour us both glasses of milk, and I take it to her in the living room, but she’s already up, unsteady on one leg.

“Whoa. Where do you think you’re going?”

“We’re not eating in here.”

“We’re not?”

She looks at me like my mother did when I mixed up the salad fork.

“Mice. No food except in the kitchen.” She points to the other room.

“You have mice?”

“I do not. And I ain’t gonna, either.”

This place is rough around the edges. Jo-Beth’s obviously house proud, but all the scrubbing and decorating can’t hide how the living room floor gives in the middle, how the appliances are from the nineties and the fixtures are from the fifties.

This whole subdivision was probably housing thrown up for workers during the war when steel was flowing out of the blast furnace at Petty’s Mill. The planners surely didn’t build it to last eighty years.

Still, I like it. I love it.

I’m not sure if Jo-Beth’s ever let me see the real her. Maybe when she was curled into me, naked, struggling to get her breath back, but that could be my ego talking.

Here in her house, though, the real Jo-Beth is on display everywhere. There are books. Heavy, coffee table books, arranged like decorations and stacked in pride of place on the mantle.The Conquistadors and the Rise of the West. The History of Spice. Deep Space: Images and Imagination.

“You read?” I glance at her collection.

“No, I just stack ‘em. Like Jenga.” She rolls her eyes at me. I guess I had that coming.

The books are all odd shapes, oversized. They go with the rest of the place. Nothing matches, and Jo-Beth hasa lotof useless stuff, but her house isn’t cluttered. It’s decorated.

Like in her kitchen. She has two guest towels hanging perfectly folded—ironed, I believe—from the oven bar. One is delicate, a crisp yellow cotton with lemons and limes embroidered in swirls. The other is thick terry with a pug in a sombrero, laughing and holding its belly. In another person’s house, you might think they don’t care, but there’s something in the way everything is folded or hung or displayed just so. She’s picked and placed each of these objects with care.

And everything, from the kitty cat clock on the kitchen wall to the pink gone-with-the-wind lamp on the end table, is bright and happy and playful.

If you would have told me last week—hell, yesterday—that I’d be sitting in a rundown duplex in Petty’s Mill, fixated on a woman’s kitchen towels, I would have said you were crazy.

I spent the past twenty-four hours trying to get my shit straight, drowning myself in work, emailingyour father ryan Adam morrisonback. I told him I’d meet him, thinking that maybe settling that would cleanse me of this temporary insanity.

But hour after hour, I only got more pissed off that she left like it was nothing. I don’t get treated like nothing anymore. Not for a long, long time.

I paid my dues. I did my school work, and Eric’s. I fought and played hard and partied harder until everyone almost forgot I wasn’t a Wade by birth. And all the while, I saved Eric from every fuck up and made sure we were the top of every class. Valedictorian and salutatorian. We finished first.

Eric took the cushy internship with venture capitalists. I went to work for the start up. And then we came home to Wade-Allyn and made it relevant in the new economy. I did that. I’m ambitious; I seize every opportunity. I don’t have to tell people my name anymore. They know.

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