Meg Evans

Rupert carried his cup of strong black coffee to the kitchen table. Outside the window, in the pale light of an early March morning, the bare snow-dusted fields stretched toward the southern horizon. Soon it would be time for planting corn and soybeans; but this year, someone else would be doing it. Last fall, after the harvest, he had sold out to one of the agribusiness corporations buying up farmland all over the Midwest.

This land had been in his family for many generations, going back to prairie settlers in log cabins. He never would have given it up if his children had shown any interest in farming. Even after all three of his daughters had moved to the city, he had expected to pass the farm on to his son, the youngest of his children. Gilbert always had been fascinated with machinery; even as a small boy, he had asked endless questions about how a tractor or a combine worked, his big blue eyes wide and eager in his tanned face. Now, with his broad shoulders and strong arms, Gil looked just like his grandfather, for whom he was named.

When Gil had decided to study mechanical engineering instead of agriculture at the state university, Rupert hadn’t been overly concerned. After all, teenagers often had notions of one sort or another before they settled down to farming. In his own youth, Rupert had dreamed of traveling to Central America and working to save the rainforest. He’d picked up Spanish fairly well from the migrant workers as a boy. What an adventure it would be, to live and work in another country! But his dreams never had reached the point of action. Like his father before him, Rupert had ended up marrying his high school sweetheart and raising a family in the old farmhouse.

Selling the land felt like betraying his ancestors, but there had been nothing else to do. After Gil graduated with his degree in mechanical engineering and took a job in the auto industry, Rupert didn’t even have any cousins interested in farming the land. They had all sold out to the big corporations, too.

He had gotten a fair price, and now he could look forward to a comfortable retirement. By most people’s standards, he ought to count himself lucky, having become a man of leisure when he wasn’t yet sixty. But it just didn’t feel right to him, somehow. His pioneer ancestors hadn’t put in all that backbreaking labor so that he could spend the next few decades idly lounging around, with no concerns beyond his golf score.

Besides, he didn’t even like golf.

Soft footsteps interrupted his brooding as his wife, Helen, padded into the kitchen in her pink robe and slippers. She poured herself some coffee and cream, stirring absently as she, too, gazed out the window. Helen’s golden-brown hair still looked much as it had in her youth, kept that way with regular visits to the beauty shop. There wasn’t much left of Rupert’s hair, which was a short, iron-gray fringe.

Helen put her coffee on the table and sat to his right. “A lot of good years,” she said quietly. She was looking at him now, rather than at the farmland; but he knew that she meant both.

Rupert put his hand on top of hers, thinking that at least Helen had a regular schedule to keep her busy in retirement. She played bridge twice a week and volunteered with the church. Sometimes she tutored children after school, though there weren’t many children left in town. Every year more of the small shops along Main Street closed down for lack of customers. Helen now had to drive twenty miles to get her hair done.

“I was remembering when we were in high school,” he told her, revealing only some of his thoughts. “Back when I wanted to save the world by doing conservation work in Central America. I thought it would be a grand adventure. Gil feels the same way about his job, designing small cars to save energy and cut down on pollution. The only difference is, he actually went and did it.”

Helen sipped her coffee slowly, holding the cup in her right hand while her left hand remained in Rupert’s grasp. He expected that she would say something about Gil, or the farm, or raising children in general. As far as he knew, Helen had no dreams of saving the world, or even exploring it. She was conservative and always had been content with life on the farm. The most adventurous she’d gotten was when she started using fingernail polish a few years ago, having grown frustrated with how often her aging nails chipped and cracked without it.

But instead of the ordinary conversation he’d been expecting, Helen asked, in a calm, reflective tone, “Are you thinking that we could go somewhere and do conservation work now? There’s nothing to keep us here, with the land sold and the children grown.”

Taken by surprise, Rupert struggled for words, his thoughts full of those imagined journeys from so long ago. Surely Helen hadn’t dreamed of anything similar? No, she must have said it only to make him happy. He couldn’t take her away from the community she always had loved.

“But your friends,” he began, “the church, all the things you do…”

Helen laughed, a sound more unexpected than her words. Soft, musical, and filled with joy, it reminded him all over again of why he had married her.

“Rupe, if I didn’t have anything else to do for the rest of my life besides listen to the church ladies gossip at the bake sales, I’d surely die of boredom.”

In answer, he clasped her hand more tightly where it lay under his. Both of them had farmers’ hands, roughened by many years of hard physical work. These hands never had been meant for a quiet retirement. When the light glinting off the snowy fields drew Rupert’s gaze to the window again, he saw not just the farmland left behind, but all the possibilities that the future still held.

Everybody on Mars drank Splotz Beer.

That was both the literal truth and the premise behind the most wildly successful advertising campaign of all time… [This is Part 2. Continue reading this installment, or read the story from the beginning.]

With little transition, the Martian sky faded from the soft pink of rose quartz to a hard-angled obsidian night, its many facets twinkling and glistening as the stars sprang into view. Only a faint blue glow along the horizon indicated where the sun had set… [Read More]

Colorful strands of holiday lights, leading up to the front entrance of the nursing home, did little to relieve the darkness of a rainy South Carolina afternoon. A reindeer statue with a blinking red nose gazed out upon the parking lot from its place of honor in an evergreen planting bed. The statue reminded Ella Mae of the deer she had hit in the twilight several years ago, when it had bounded out into the road without her seeing it. After that she had given up driving.

She waited in the passenger seat of the Buick, listening to the rain patter on its roof, while her housekeeper Marta walked around with the umbrella and opened the door. Struggling to step down while holding the neatly wrapped box she had brought, Ella Mae placed her feet carefully on the slick asphalt. Marta put a hand on her arm to steady her.

Once inside the building’s lobby, the two women parted ways. Marta, pushing an errant strand of dark hair away from her round face, settled down in a comfortable chair with a Sudoku puzzle book. Ella Mae got a visitor’s badge from a cheerful young receptionist and went on through another door. On either side of the wide hall beyond, thick pine wreaths adorned doorways that led into small visiting areas. The heavy fragrance of the wreaths, and likely some pine air freshener too, didn’t quite cover the institutional smell of bleach and other cleaning products.

Cousin Florence came into view at the other end of the hall, wearing a blue polyester dress and pushing her walker. She had been obese most of her life, and the weight had only just come off a few years ago, now that she no longer cooked for herself. Under sparse white hair that had gotten only a desultory combing, the skin of Florence’s face and neck hung in loose folds, like rivulets of melted wax running away from a candle at the end of its wick.

The right side of Florence’s mouth always looked like it was turned up in a sneer. Ella Mae knew this was the result of a stroke and Florence couldn’t control it; but that was sometimes hard to keep in mind, given Florence’s habit of starting to complain the moment a visitor arrived. Today, just as she got within earshot, Florence launched into her favorite topic—the unpardonable neglect from her four children, all of whom had left South Carolina long ago and rarely came to see her.

“Not one of them can be bothered,” Florence declared, as she maneuvered her walker into one of the visiting rooms, “to come and see their poor lonely mother at Christmas. They’re so wicked and thoughtless. I might not last another year, Ella Mae, and then they’d be coming to my funeral instead, if they could even stir their lazy bones that far.”

This lament no longer had much emotional impact after having been repeated each year, in one form or another, over the past four decades. Cousin Florence had made up her mind that she was a neglected old lady as soon as her children left home. To nobody’s surprise, that complaint had turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ella Mae put her box on a coffee table and settled herself on an overstuffed pea-green sofa, nodding at intervals and making sympathetic noises as her cousin’s rant continued. Her weekly visits always went much this way. She didn’t begrudge Florence a little company now and again, though; it seemed only the decent thing to do, now that both women had been widowed for many years and most of their kinfolk had left town.

The ringing of her cell phone gave Ella Mae a brief reprieve from this one-sided conversation. She glanced down at the picture on the screen. It was Timmy, still staring at the world with the bright curious eyes he’d had at his birth, although by now he had deep crow’s feet around them and had lost most of his hair. Ella Mae touched the screen and gave him a cheerful “Hello.”

“I’m working overtime again tonight, Mama.”

Timmy never had been much of a talker. He could manage a sentence or two at a time, but not much beyond that. Telephone calls, when they went on for more than a minute, left him as nervous as if he’d picked up a snake. Even so, he always called without fail when he had a change of plans.

“I’ll let Marta know, dear. Bye.”

Ella Mae put her phone back in her handbag before her cousin had time to say anything about the interruption. What Florence thought of Timmy had long been a sore spot. Almost a half-century ago, Florence had said some unkind things and Ella Mae hadn’t spoken to her for months. If Ella Mae thought about it for too long, she still got upset sometimes, although she knew there wasn’t any sense in that. By now, Florence, who had been diagnosed with dementia, probably didn’t even remember what had been said. Although her cousin’s childhood memories remained clear as a bell, anything else was hit-or-miss.

All the same, Ella Mae still felt she was owed the apology she’d never gotten. Florence had been so hateful all those years ago when Timmy got his first job, telling her, “You raised that boy all wrong, Ella Mae. He can’t do for himself worth a nickel; you’re still fixing his meals and doing his laundry, and now you’re driving him to work. He never goes out on dates or does much of anything besides building those silly model trains in your basement. What’s he going to do when you can’t take care of him anymore? That boy is bound to end up in an institution, Ella Mae, mark my words.”

As it turned out, although Timmy never left home or learned how to drive, nothing dramatic came of it when Ella Mae got older. Marta took charge of both the household chores and the driving, and life went on much as usual. Timmy had a good union job in a factory, earning more than enough to pay Marta’s wages and keep up their small house.

Reminding herself once again that she ought to know better than to hold a grudge against her cousin for so many years, Ella Mae turned her attention to the gift-wrapped box. “Go ahead and open your Christmas present, Florence. It’s made special for you.”

With a sniff as though to demonstrate how little she expected, Florence picked at the ribbons and wrapping paper, complaining all the while about her selfish children who couldn’t be bothered to get any Christmas gifts for their poor old mother. Ella Mae knew they had in fact sent gifts last week, but she held her peace. Then Florence slowly lifted the lid off the box, revealing the bright Christmastime tableau inside.

The old train station had been demolished many years ago, when passenger trains stopped coming through town. Timmy had worked both from his boyhood memories and from Ella Mae’s photo albums in creating the scene. There was the little building with its holiday decorations perfectly rendered, a train just coming into the station, and a small crowd of carefully painted figurines waiting in their old-fashioned clothing. One of the figurines, a tall woman with a fancy hat and a long fur coat, had a little dog trotting beside her. The dog wore a red sweater.

As soon as Florence’s gaze fell on that particular figurine, she amazed Ella Mae by bursting out into a loud girlish giggle.

“Why, I declare—that’s Aunt Rhoda with her spoiled-rotten poodle!”

Ella Mae glanced down at the tiny painted face, which was little more than a blur without her reading glasses. When Timmy had shown her the completed scene, she hadn’t thought the characters in it were meant to be real people. But then, come to think of it, she hadn’t asked.

“And look, Ella Mae, that’s us!” Florence pointed gleefully at two girls in sweaters and skirts. “That’s when we went down to the train station to meet Uncle Frank when he came back from business in the city. He gave us candy canes and told us he’d brought presents, but we couldn’t open them till Christmas.”

“I remember. Aunt Rhoda’s poodle nipped me on the ankle. Horrid little beast. Ruined my best pair of stockings.” And then Ella Mae also found herself dissolving helplessly into giggles as her memories came back with more clarity. She finally added, “You know what, Florence, I do believe you’re right. Uncle Frank took pictures of us at the train station, and they were in one of the photo albums Timmy looked at while he was working on this.”

Cousin Florence looked up from the scene, her pale blue eyes moist. “Ella Mae, could you get copies of those photos for me?”

“I sure will. Next week when I visit, I’ll bring everything that’s in all my photo albums. Timmy has a scanner on his computer that can copy the photos, and there’s a special kind of picture frame with a screen for displaying them. He bought me one of those frames for my birthday, a few years ago, and put some digital pictures on it that he took with his camera. I don’t quite understand how it works, but Timmy does. He’ll fix you right up.”

For the first time since she’d moved into the nursing home, Florence had a peaceful look. Even the twitch at the corner of her mouth no longer seemed to have any agitation in it, and her gaze was completely lucid.

“You raised a good son, Ella Mae.”

Laila had packed her bag for the return trip to France. Uncle Mustafa would be coming over in a few minutes to drive her to the train station. On impulse, she walked through the little kitchen and stepped outside into the backyard… [This is Part 7. Continue reading this final installment, or read the story from the beginning.]

Laila put a clean plate away in the cabinet and took another plate from Aysha, who was washing the dishes by hand while Laila dried them. Except for the soft splashing of the water in the kitchen sink, the house was very quiet… [This is Part 6. Continue reading this installment, or read the story from the beginning.]

Lively conversation filled the halls of the girls’ high school where Aysha taught French, history, and world cultures… [This is Part 5. Continue reading this installment, or read the story from the beginning.]

The pale light of early morning tumbled through the high windows of Aysha’s bedroom. Though it was smaller than Laila’s dorm room back in Paris, every wall was crammed full of books on long shelves, with titles in Arabic, French, and English… [This is Part 4. Continue reading this installment, or read the story from the beginning.]

“This is the house where you lived as a small child. Do you remember it?”

Aysha spoke quietly to Laila in Arabic, her words hard to distinguish above the rattling of utensils in the dining room. Her brother Saeed was busy setting the table… [This is Part 3. Continue reading this installment, or read the story from the beginning.]

Carrying only one bag, Laila stepped down from the train onto a plain concrete platform, newly built like much of Libya’s infrastructure. A ticket booth to her left stood empty in the twilight… [This is Part 2. Continue reading this installment, or read the story from the beginning.]