kind best, though she’ll eat any flavor, really. Her very favorites are the special ones that come out for holidays. Spongy cakes shaped like Christmas trees or hearts or pumpkins, covered in stiff icing she can peel away with her teeth. Mari buys them a box at a time, casually, like they don’t matter to her at all, but she never puts them in the pantry or in the special drawer where all the other snacks go. She hides them. She hoards them.
She doesn’t have to. Her fridge is always full. The freezers, too, both of them, the small one in the refrigerator here in the kitchen and the full-sized chest freezer in the garage. Sometimes, mostly at night when everyone else is asleep, Mari likes to stand in front of the freezer and peer inside at all the wealth she has collected.
Ryan never seems to notice or care how much food there is in the house. He comes home from work and expects—and finds—dinner waiting for him. No matter what kind of effort Mari has to make to provide it, she makes sure there’s always a full meal. Takeout or homemade, there’s always a meat, a vegetable, salad, a grain, a bread. Fresh bread. She can’t get enough. Mari usually makes it herself. She uses a bread machine to help her, but she’s still the one who fills the pan with carefully measured amounts of water, flour, sugar, salt, yeast. Every morning she bakes a fresh loaf, and every night they eat it.
Sometimes, Ethan helps her with the preparation. Kendra used to, but now she’s too busy with her cell phone or iPad, texting and tweeting and whatever it is teenage girls do. But Ethan is still young enough to like cracking the eggs and measuring the flour.
At eight, Ethan is still young enough for Mari to relate to. Oh, she loves Kendra, her firstborn, her daughter. They do girly things like shop for shoes, paint their nails, hit the chick flicks in the theater while Ryan and Ethan stay home. Mari loves her daughter, sometimes with a fierceness that takes her breath away...but she doesn’t really understand her.
It’s not that Kendra is unknowable. Even at fifteen, she still talks to her mom. Unlike her friends, whom Kendra has revealed barely speak to their parents unless it’s to complain. Sure, there have been some bumps along the way. Temper tantrums, pouty faces, arguments about curfews or grades. Mari supposes this is normal and is grateful it’s never been worse.
Kendra is knowable, she hasn’t grown away from them, hasn’t taken to painting her nails and lips and eyelids black or disappearing into her room to burn incense and listen to music with bad lyrics. It’s Mari who cannot quite seem to bridge the distance between the toddler with curly white-blond hair who liked to serve tea in plastic cups while wearing only a half-shredded pink tutu, and this tall, lanky and gangly teenager with iron-straightened hair the color of sand. Kendra might still sleep with an array of stuffed animals at the foot of her bed, but she’s already talking about college and moving to California to live on her own, about getting her driver’s license and access to a credit card. About growing up and growing away.
But Ethan, the boy who favors her. Him, Mari still understands. Because he’s only eight, not yet nine, though that birthday will sneak up on her before she knows it, and then he, too, will start to grow away from her. But for now she understands him because Ethan, like all children under the age of ten, is still mostly wild.
At the sink, Mari uses the sprayer to rinse the stainless steel clean. She turns off the water. Dries her hands. She looks out the window, over the tips of basil, rosemary and thyme she’s growing in her container garden on the sill. Out into the grass, which for the first time in as long as she can remember is getting too long. Ryan usually trims the grass so tight to the ground nothing living could ever possibly hide in it. In the spring, summer and fall he rides his mower every weekend, beer in hand. He might not be able to find the laundry basket, but the yard is somehow tied up in his manly pride. It’s not like him to leave the yard untended, but over the past few months he’s been working long hours. Coming home late. The weather has been rainy for the past three weekends, leaving him to sit inside on the couch watching a series of whatever random programs he finds when he taps the keys of the remote.
Now the grass would tickle her shins if she were to walk outside into it. So she does. Barefooted, step-stepping carefully from the wide wooden deck onto the slate patio and finally, at last, into spring-soft grass that bends beneath her toes and does, indeed, tickle her shins. Mari sighs. She closes her eyes. She tips her face to the late-afternoon light and breathes in deep.
She listens.
A bird chirps softly. A dog barks, far off. She hears the murmur of voices, a television or radio, from the neighbor’s house on the other side of the yard. A passing car. The squeak of bicycle wheels. There is sometimes the rustle of squirrels in the trees or rabbits hopping into the brush, but most of the wildlife in this neighborhood has been eradicated by family pets, loud children or exterminators.
These are the sounds of her life. She misses the sound of running water that had been the constant backdrop of her childhood. Two houses down, the Smithsons have a plastic waterfall set up in their backyard, but it’s too far away for her to hear. Mari used to have a container fountain on her deck, just big enough to grow a single water lily, but last winter she forgot to bring it in before the first freeze and the pump burned out. Ryan tossed the entire thing in the trash, and she hasn’t yet replaced it.
Her feet swish in the grass as she steps forward again. A twig crackles and snaps. Mari pauses. She breathes in deeply again, lashes fluttering on her cheeks, but none of this is the same as what she’s missing. This is not what she’s hoping to feel.
That she only gets in dreams.
She opens her eyes and looks at her yard. Ryan mows the lawn but won’t bother with weeding. They have a service for that. Mari hates to pull up what the Home Owner’s Association calls weeds and she calls wildflowers. She despises pulling up plants only to put down the chopped-up bits of dead trees. Mulching seems like the utmost waste to her. Ridiculous and expensive. She and Ryan fought about it when they moved into this neighborhood, but the HOA had rules about “curb appeal.” She notes the carefully pruned beds that should be beautiful and yet leave her cold, still wanting. Still suddenly desperate for something lovely. Something wild.
The only beauty Mari sees is in the far back corner of the yard, the one that butts up to the tree line and beyond that, the last farmer’s field that will be another subdivision by the end of the year. Tall oaks, weather-worn, defend her emerald-green and perfectly manicured lawn from the tangled, reckless patches of clover that edge the soybean field. Here’s where the gardening crew tosses the cuttings, the scrap, the leftovers. It’s where Ryan dumps the grass from his mower bag. It’s a shady place, a haven for small, running creatures. It’s hardly overgrown, but it’s the closest she can get to the forest. There’s a word to describe it that she once read in a book. Verdant. That’s what this place is.
There’s a fairy ring of mushrooms here, too, in the small, chilly bit of shade. They’re edible, though Mari knows better than to pluck them, rinse them and sauté them in butter. Her children won’t eat mushrooms no matter how they’re prepared, and Ryan will only eat the kind that comes in a can if they’re on top of pizza. Besides, nobody she knows eats mushrooms they find in their yard. As with many of her long-standing habits, it would be considered...strange. Mari touches the velvety cap of one and leaves it to survive in its small patch of soil.
This is where Ryan finds her, sitting on an old lawn chair he’s tried three or four times to toss into the trash. The plastic woven strips are frayed and sagging, molded to her butt, and the metal legs have rusted. Mari keeps it because it doesn’t seem like such a sin to sit on a chair like this one in this forgotten bit of backyard, while taking one of the newer, fancier deck chairs would. Ryan says nothing about the chair now. In fact, he says nothing at all.
Mari stands. “What’s wrong?”
She’s
