THE LAND OF THE FIT
Beth Staples
Muriel sits in a folding chair at a meeting of the Women Who Worship, which she loathes in a way that feels productive. She has just chosen a second slice of pound cake. There are questions she is hoping this meeting will help answer still, all these days and years after the hoping first began. She wants a way of thinking about God that doesn’t sound like something downloaded from the internet. She wants beautitude and awe, to feel the swell of the organ music in her heart. Or, if not that, she wants rules for living in a world like this, for climate change and racism and post-wildfire donations – Christianity in action.
Ford is at bell-choir practice down the hall, his preadolescent body made even smaller by a large white robe. She sees him in her mind’s eye practicing “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” how he must manage a record number of bells, six, thrusting each one forward like he’s toasting, using his white-gloved hands to dampen the sound. The Women Who Worship meet in the fellowship hall, which smells of delicate book pages, Christmas ornaments, and spaghetti. They are here because one of their parishioners has died, a woman with four children who drowned in her own bathtub. Muriel wonders if she had been drunk or took too many painkillers, but no one will talk about this. They are quoting Bible passages instead. “He has made every-thing beautiful in its time,” Rachelle says. But Muriel was jogging by the house when the ambulance arrived, and there was nothing beautiful about it. It is the third time in three weeks that she’s been outside someone’s house when an ambulance arrived, a fact she has confessed to no one. She has been jogging, and – at the same time – her neighbors have been dying. She doesn’t want to be dramatic, but the coincidence has made her feel, how to put it, like an agent of death.
The other women can tell she’s not being present. They tell her, they always tell her, to “let Jesus into her heart,” which she would call a metaphor. They think it’s exactly, literally, what she should do. “Just open your heart and let Him right in,” Yolanda says, as if He were one of their pound cake slices. To make the metaphor easier for her to understand, they employ other, harder-to-understand metaphors. She should don the breastplate of righteousness and brandish the sword of the Word. Even better if she can cram her feet (they’re large for a woman of her height, aren’t they?) into the pointy metal shoes of peace. They shake their heads when she asks what shoes of peace are doing in a metaphor about the armor and war. They want to know why she has to make everything so difficult, insists on using the word metaphor every single Thursday. She wants to tell them about the jogging/dying thing just to shock them, to be difficult-er, but she knows what they would say: that the Lord works in mysterious ways, that everything happens for a reason.
She’d started taking Ford to church when he was a baby because it was something to do on Sundays, and they provided childcare. She could sit in a pew while someone rocked him down the hall, laid him down in a crib from the seventies, waved pairs of ark-bound animals in front of his face. (Those animals are from a story about God drowning nearly the entire world, but babies seem to love them.) She would sit quietly and alone and let the sermons and the hymns and the prayers fill the air around her, willfully pushing away her own cries of “bullshit!” Afterward, she ate their Christian donuts and drank their Christian coffee and guiltily wheeled Ford home.
Now, because of Ford, she comes weekly. Sometimes twice a week, though she sometimes waits for him in the coffee shop down the street. He is twelve, on the cusp of something. She has watched him serve as acolyte and pass the offering plate and wash cars in the parking lot to raise cash for church-sponsored activities. She attends church the way most people go to the gym: for conditioning, that her body may become the more fit for something. But also for Ford. It is one of the ways she knows to love him.
On the ride home in the car, she asks him for details of bell practice, which she wants only to confirm his non-Christian humanity.
“We had to move to the nursery,” he says. “Scheduling conflict.
Why does it always smell so bad in there?”
“Diapers,” she says. But she thinks the whole church smells bad. “You used to be in diapers,” she says, almost to herself, almost in dis-belief.
“Mom, stop,” he says with an eyeroll. He has not yet figured out how to really roll his eyes. He bulges them and shakes his head. How will she preserve that look for posterity? How can she alone be in charge of it?
“Are you going to go for a run again when we get home? What are you up to, fourteen seconds?” He is twirling the friendship bracelet on his arm, a relic of youth group.
“Fourteen seconds might give me a heart attack,” she says, though it hurts a little. She is trying to work her way up to real exercise. Ford has not made the connection between their neighbors dying and her jogging. She cannot make it for him.
“But this pound cake won’t?” He takes it from his lap and crams the entire piece into his mouth. The Women Who Worship made her take it. They love Ford, whose heart is full of Jesus.
***
Muriel started the Sloth to Sleek program three weeks before, her sleekdom set to culminate on All Hallows Eve. She imagined, still imagines, emerging into the holiday as something sexy – a sexy vampire or a sexy bunny or, hell, a sexy nun. She knows that her body-image problems are total bullshit, but that doesn’t keep her post-pregnancy paunch, her perimenopausal pouch, her mom belly, her bubblegina (how has she amassed so many names for it?) from feeling less problematic. It has had twelve years to settle in, and still she thinks of it as something to be shed. She also knows she’s about to consume an incredible amount of Halloween candy, and there’s nothing to be done about that.
Day 1 of Sloth to Sleek asked her to run for thirty seconds, two times. So she tried that, down the block past her three neighbor’s houses, and then she had to stop, panting, at the corner by the stop sign. She’d bought a new pair of sneakers, size 10, just for this dumb exercise. She had never exercised as a child, never played a sport. The instant she has ever felt out of breath, she assumed death was close at hand. She knows this is probably the difference between her and those who exercise, the people who live in the land of the fit. They find comfort in their own discomfort.
She picked up again – only thirty seconds to go – and as she rounded the corner, she saw an ambulance in front of the big brick house in the middle of the block. She stood off to the side, hands on her hips, waiting for the emergency to reveal itself. The medics were in there a long time, and she finally decided to walk home.
It was a heart attack, a man in his eighties, her neighbor Laura told her the next day. That was sad, but not as sad as other things she could think of. Nothing to panic about or obsess over.
After that, she was concerned about running again, but only be-cause of how she’d had to huff and puff while doing it. At the office, she crowd-sourced advice for surviving the twenty-nine remaining days. You should drink more water, her coworker said. But that was not who she was as a person, a carrier of refillable water bottles with stickers affixed to them from the local running store, advocating an end to the patriarchy. She supported both of those things, in theory, but she preferred to do so in her own quiet ways. And so she was also not a visibly hydrated person, or a hydrated person at all, though she had no doubt that hydration might drastically improve her well-being.
Maybe you should buy exercise shorts that aren’t from the eighties, Ford offered. But the new shoes had already set her back too much, and she couldn’t justify buying anything else until she knew if this thing would stick. Plus, she was saving to send him on a trip with their church (his church) to Costa Rica, though she hadn’t told him this. She was nervous about the trip, about him being away from her in a foreign county. At night, when she couldn’t sleep, her news app offered up reasons not to let him out of her sight. That night she saw a boy had died in Belize on a senior class trip, drowned in a river just feet away from his teachers and classmates.
You should create a playlist, her friend Patrice said on their lunch break at work, and she liked that. Make it nostalgic, Patrice offered, something that makes you feel energetic and youthful. So she loaded it with songs from the nineties, songs she remembered listening to as she rode around in the backs of cars with her friends, smoking pot. Smoking was antithetical to running. But she thought if she could finish this thing, maybe she’d deserve to get high and eat, like, a whole chocolate cake.
She worried that the amount of time she spent thinking about sweets was keeping her from having more complicated, interesting thoughts.
The next week, she saw the ambulance again. She’d been running and walking at intervals prompted by her app. It was hot for October – she had waited until fall to start this thing, afraid of being too hot and too breathless at the same time – but the weather seemed to be punishing her. Endorphins, whatever they were, had not reared their welcome heads. Ambulances had. One screeched into the driveway of a blue split-level just in front of her and two men got out, running. She heard screaming from inside the house, even over the sound of Nirvana. Sweat rolled down her back. She smelled like teen spirit, she thought, and then she felt bad for thinking something so stupid right in the middle of whatever was unfolding inside that house, that she actually ran all the way home.
Her news app explained. A newborn baby was mauled by the family dog and died. She could not imagine anything more awful than this. But she couldn’t stop herself from imagining it: the bed-room, the bassinet, the dog, the discovery, the panicked 911 call, the gun that killed the dog, the cleanup. The screaming. That the lives of those parents must somehow go on. This was all happening three blocks over.
She didn’t want to tell Ford about the baby, but he’d heard at school. At dinner he asked how he’s supposed to get the pictures out of his head. She hated this feeling – bumping into her own parental inadequacies, watching them get perpetuated. She should’ve thought to Google this, ask a better parent. “Hey Siri, What do you do with the bad pictures in your head?”
“Rhett says I should pray about it,” Ford said. Rhett, the youth pastor. Rhett, who seems ready to play his acoustic guitar in almost any scenario, who encourages the kids to text him at any hour, who has too many children for a twenty-six-year-old, whose wife seems harried and overwhelmed by her Jesus-themed jewelry and her many children.
“Do you know how to pray?” she asked Ford. She remembered the occasional trying, those years ago, alone in her pew. Lord, help me to have the strength to raise this baby by myself. She did not believe in a lord, though she pictured him anyway, the long-haired white-guy Je-sus-God she’d been force-fed images of by, well, America? Lord, help me to get this inaccurate image of thyself out of mine head.
“Rhett says he just talks to Jesus. He said we could picture him like he’s one of our bros.”
Muriel tried not to spit out her food. “A bro? He said that?” She had enrolled her son inadvertently in a Jesus fraternity.
“He’s just trying to make Jesus more approachable,” Ford said.
“It’s not that I find him unapproachable as much as I find him . . .”
She stopped herself from saying “stupid,” looking at her son’s face.
It was her fault he was praying. She couldn’t keep shitting on the idea of it. “. . . elusive,” she finally finished. “Should we try to do it together?” Muriel reached for Ford’s hands across the table and he reached back, not a touch of reservation. She thanked Jesus-God for this, the chance to wrap her hands around his, the wholeness of his body, the soft pads of his nail-bitten hands.
He bowed his head.
Muriel did too, but she did not close her eyes. She looked up at him through her eyelashes, looking for – what? Proof that he was communing with something? Or a slight wrinkle in his brow, some welcome sense of doubt?
“Dear Jesus Bro,” she started. Not even a smirk from Ford.
Maybe it was her lack of reverence that kept the praying from working. She cleared her throat. “Jesus, may the Wimberleys find some kind of peace after this terrible tragedy. May their thoughts of their baby be of . . . ” she paused. “Of her smile, of her happiness. Help them to let go of the pain, help them not to feel responsible. Help us too, not to live inside this tragedy, not to let it occupy our minds.”
The last part felt selfish, but she also knew you can’t let everyone else’s pain into your life or it will consume you. She knew this theoretically, though she invited it in too often through Instagram. Maybe she wanted to be consumed. Maybe if she was consumed by the rest of the world’s pain, her own love could proceed unscathed.
“That was good,” Ford said. “Rhett would have liked it.”
* * *
When she found out she was having a boy, she cried for weeks. She didn’t know what to do with a boy. What would she tell him about his penis? How would she help him not to be the worst kind of boy? She’d read We Need to Talk About Kevin. When boys turned bad, they turned real bad. She made jokes to her friends, “Great, another white man! Just what America needs!” and then she laughed. But was she joking? She’d taken an implicit bias test as part of her onboarding at her job, and it revealed that she associated violence, guns, and danger with white-boy teenagers. Columbine, Charleston, Charlottes ville: she saw the acne-splattered faces of enraged white boys when she closed her eyes. She didn’t want people to see her son this way.
“The problem is not other people,” Patrice had said over coffee, Ford squawking quietly in a baby carrier at their feet. “You’re seeing him this way. This is coming from you.” She didn’t want to doom her son to toxic masculinity and violence, but she shirked from groups of boys on the street, at the park, anticipating them of some cruelty. What if her own expectation of it was the thing that made it come true?
All through Ford’s childhood, she’d panicked whenever she saw evidence of any kind of cruelty. She taught him the word consent when he was four, making sure he knew that no one could touch his body without his permission, but also that he was to keep his hands to himself. She had planned, when she felt he was ready, to tell him that the only way to have sex was to let the girl – wait, no, the other per-son – place his penis inside of them. Let there be no room for misunderstanding or error.
* * *
After the second death on her jogging route, it started to feel like a form of prayer, checking her news app. She stole spare moments at her desk, between Zoom calls and emails. Every time she let her-self inside someone else’s tragedy, it felt like she was saving herself from something, saving Ford from something, diverting the neighborhood’s swirling dread away from her own house. The more she read, the more her app offered up. A projectile from a lawnmower, a fence, a piece of celery, eye drops, a black walnut: lethal weapons, all. She added them to a kind of mental list, knowing lightning doesn’t usually strike twice. Ford was safe from them. But could every other thing potentially kill him? She read and prayed and prayed and read and pray-read.
“Stop it,” Patrice said when she caught her over the cubicle wall, a reflex to nip a bad habit in the bud, like when Muriel saw Ford biting his nails or picking his nose. How could she even begin to explain that it felt good for her? And even better, that it seemed to be energizing her. She started to run more, even when she didn’t have to. For two days, she jogged practically everywhere: from her car to her office building, from her desk to the copy machine. She felt breathless even when she wasn’t running, and the running seemed to give her body a way to catch up with her lungs, her heart. She jogged from her car into the house that day after work and found Ford waiting for her in the kitchen.
“I want to go to Costa Rica,” he said. His hands were actually on his hips, and she could see the practiced defiance in the way he held his lips tight. “Tiny mouth,” she wanted to say, which is a game they played sometimes, to see who could make their lips the smallest.
“I know you do,” she said, and she could feel her tired heart pounding beneath her shirt, from all of the running, from all of the fretting about what to do over exactly this. She knew she could tell him she’d been saving for it, that the revelation would buy her some time and goodwill, but the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth.
“Tell me why I can’t.”
“Because you’re twelve.” Which was shorthand for “you’re not ready” or “you’re too young,” but neither of those was what she meant.
“Practically everyone who is going is twelve,” he said, and she could feel the checklist of his thinking, how he wasn’t going to stop until he crossed off the whole list. But she would not be swayed by facts. She had been curating a faith in the world’s malevolence that was both full of facts and ready to bat them away like gnats.
“You know it’s a lot of money.”
“You bought those dumb sneakers,” he said, gesturing at her feet, and moving on to the financial part of his checklist. She felt a flare of anger, a welcome relief. She was allowed to call them dumb, but he was not, and he knew that.
“I bought these with my money,” she said. “You could have gotten a paper route or started walking dogs.”
“You wouldn’t let me get a job,” Ford said. Which she knew was true, but one thing she knew about being a parent was that you could use your power to assert a reality even you didn’t believe in.
“I would have,” she said. Even as she refused it, she questioned her own position. Why not just give him what he wanted?
“Mom, please,” he said. “Rhett says I can call home every day.”
She felt her nose tingle, the onset of tears. It was too soon for all of that – for her son to be out living his life, her waiting for his calls. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just can’t.”
She knew from the softening of his face that he could see it – her fear. The thought that she’d made it visible to him, that he might be forced to bear any of its weight, was worse than nearly anything else she could imagine. It was her job to keep it, and keep the world at bay. She watched him change his mind about the softening. Clench his fists. Puff out his chest. “You need to get laid,” he said, and he ran from the room.
The truth was that she hadn’t had sex in seventeen years. It had been a choice, after so very many failed relationships, to remove men from her life as much as possible. There was nothing healthy about her relationship with sex. She wanted men to like her, a feeling she re-members from as far back as she remembers anything: the eyes of men on her, her body offered up for scrutiny, then to be consumed. When she decided she wouldn’t engage with it anymore, she felt free. With-out having to think about them, she eventually decided she wanted to have a baby. She had picked out some sperm, she had injected her own ass with progesterone, she had gone through labor with her doula, and here she was, living with a boy who was turning into a man.
The absence of men had also left her with only a casual sense of the types of men in the world. Her fears and perceptions were based entirely on stereotypes: episodes of reality television, mostly. Maybe this was true for everyone about everything, but she felt it acutely as a lack of imagination. She clung to the categories like a life raft, even as she recognized them as problematic. Rhett was a Jesus freak frat bro. The angry manifesto-writing teenager had been well documented. There was also the homophobic sporty dude, which is why she had steered Ford away from the lacrosse team. Mr. Carson, down the street, was a finance guy who wore his sunglasses on the back of his neck, high fived his coworkers, and moved other people’s money around to make his own money. Even the sensitive science fiction reader who knew how to do the Rubik’s Cube in under a minute gave her pause. They were all white, these men in her stereotypes. She granted men of color more interesting stories and thoughts and abilities. She worried this was just another kind of racism.
She does not want Ford to be any of them. She cannot see who she wants Ford to be.
But also, Ford is Ford is Ford. She loves every ounce of him in its immediacy, its specificity. It is only when she tries to comprehend him in the abstract, future-Ford, that her imagination falters. A Ford who would say “get laid,” which Ford was this?
* * *
The next week, she was running through the leafy dusk of her neighborhood and sneezing when she heard the ambulance again. She stopped in her tracks. Had her sneeze just sounded like an ambulance? No, it was unmistakable, and getting closer. Over the rooftops of the houses, she saw the sky flashing a pinky-purple, and then the stop sign illuminated by its beams as it rounded the corner. It came to a halt right next to her, and those same two men jumped out and ran past her into the house. She ducked inside a tree on the front lawn, a magnolia that had grown to the size of a house. There was a little child-sized hideout under the canopy of leaves, what Ford would have called a “Ford camp” when he was small. She silenced Weezer, and then grabbed a glossy leaf and ran her thumb against it as she waited. Her heart was pounding. What do they say, three time’s a charm? What kind of charm could this possibly be? A few minutes later the men emerged from the house wheeling a stretcher too slowly. There was a body on it with a sheet over top, and she heard wailing from inside the house. She closed her eyes tightly until she couldn’t hear any more sounds, which took a very long time, and then she went home. The mom in the bathtub, she found out later. The four kids.
She carries those three deaths with her to church that Thursday – she holds them through her meeting with the Women Who Worship. She holds them on the car ride home with Ford, as he eats the pound cake. They have not talked about the Costa Rica trip since their fight, and Ford has seemed overly friendly, as if the cruelty of his remark had exorcised something, had been the point all along.
When they get home, she finds an email from Rhett in her inbox. The deposit for the Costa Rica trip was due that day, and she had not paid it, though she’d had the check in her pocket. Rhett’s email has an itinerary and a list of safety procedures and language she would consider Jesus propaganda that overemphasized the trip’s impact on the spiritual life of Costa Ricans. The fact that he’s included her on this message even though Ford isn’t technically going, not yet, she interprets this as an act of hostility. She tries to imagine what it would feel like to have said yes. In the con column: Ford getting on an air-plane and staying by the ocean with Rhett and his guitar, the building of some sort of shelter that appears altruistic but that is probably white-savior nonsense. But in the pro column: Ford learning how to do something with his hands (she certainly can’t teach him), and Ford’s happiness. She can practically feel his potential happiness like a heat on her skin.
She googles, against her own best judgement, “Costa Rican trag-edies,” and the internet offers them up: stories of planes crashing and shark attacks and sun poisoning. Of freak hotel accidents involving elevator shafts, window blinds, and treadmills. But she does not know what she is not thinking of, what tragedy has not yet happened but might. She wishes she could trust Rhett, in his western-themed shirts and his cutoff shorts, to have safety at the forefront of his mind, but she thinks he chose to be a youth pastor because in any other con-text he would be ridiculous or worse, totally creepy.
When she says “creepy,” when all of the women say “creepy,” what do they mean? Lecherous. Emitting a kind of sexual availability in non-sexual situations. Well, all situations for her are non-sexual.
She decides to go for a run. She decides this with some amount of post-Women Who Worship defiance. She certainly cannot have anything to do with the deaths of her neighbors. If church or Instagram has taught her anything, it’s how little power she has. (And yet, if the parenting blogs have taught her anything, it’s how consistently she is probably ruining Ford’s life.) It is the start of week 4. She is supposed to run for a solid fifteen minutes now, and finds herself near the entrance to their development, the sign that says Vista Mews, which is both nonsensical and inaccurate, and makes her picture a small cat on the edge of a large mountain every time. She approaches the first house in, right next to the sign, and sees a woman face down on its front lawn. She thinks at first that it might be a Halloween decoration – there are skeletons hanging from trees and playing musical instruments all over the lawn. But the front door is wide open, and that’s when a terrific heat rushes into her ears. She dials 911, tries to explain that someone is hurt, and tells them to look for the sign, the Mews, and they’ll see her. She can’t remember the name of the street she’s on. She can’t really work her own tongue. She approaches the woman, the body, the person, the victim. She/it is wearing a brown sweater and jeans, socks with little birds on them. Her hair is in a messy bun pointing toward the sky. She reaches for the woman’s wrist, looks for a pulse. She doesn’t want to have to flip her over, so it is a relief when she hears the siren. The hospital isn’t far. She backs away a plausible distance, wanting to give them room but not wanting to flee too overtly. She senses the EMTs rushing past her, but only in the vaguest way. She feels her legs crumple, and she watches the scene recede to a pinprick of light, like turning off an old TV.
When she wakes, she is at the hospital. Ford is at the foot of the bed with Patrice.
“Maybe the Sloth to Sleek program just, like, isn’t for you,” Ford says. He looks worried. He is wearing a plaid shirt and jeans and she wonders if he could be a hiker guy, a farmer guy, an REI employee or mountain biker. A lover of animals. A tender of trees. A forest ranger!
“You saved that woman’s life,” Patrice says, giving her hand a little squeeze.
“She’s alive?” Muriel is incredulous.
“She’s two floors up. She had some kind of seizure, but she’s fine. The nurse came down to let you know. The woman wanted to thank you.”
Muriel feels like she can breathe for the first time in weeks. “Thank God,” she says.
“They want to keep you overnight,” Patrice says. “You hit your head pretty badly on the Vista Mews sign. You have some stitches back there.”
Muriel’s hand flies up to the back of her head, which is partially shaved and hurts incredibly, she realizes.
“You should be Frankenstein or something for Halloween,” Ford says.
Patrice rolls her eyes the way one is supposed to. “You were lucky. You cracked it good, which I think was actually the doctor’s diagnosis. A real good head crack.”
“That’s crazy,” she says. Some people walk under a tree in a storm or eat a pine nut or trip on the sidewalk they’ve walked on thousands of times, and it’s over for them. She bashes her head forcefully on a concrete sign and she is fine. She doesn’t know how to live in a world like this.
“Will you stay with Ford tonight?” she asks Patrice.
“Mom,” Ford says. “That’s so dumb. I’ll be fine. Plus, I have youth group. We’re getting ready for the Halloween party.”
“I’ll stay,” Patrice says.
They hug her and then they leave her.
She can’t fall asleep in the hospital that night. She finds her phone on the chair in the corner, still playing her running playlist through the dangling headphones – Blink 182. She turns it off and opens her news app. She needs to see all of the bad things that have happened while she was unconscious, and it gives them to her. She pictures kneeling in church as she reads, red velvet against her shins. There is a helicopter crash that kills the famous, the immune. There is a girl who forgot to bring her inhaler to school and walks too much on a field trip. There is a house fire started by a charcoal grill. And good God, the gender reveal parties. All of the parents are dying before their children are even born. She should be able to fall asleep a penitent, safe from tragedy because of her current tragedy, but still she can’t. The woman is upstairs somewhere, the one who didn’t die.
They release her after rounds the next morning. The sun is too bright in the parking lot, and she can’t find her car before she remembers she didn’t drive. She will have to walk or call Patrice to get her. She sets off across town. She is Red Hot Chili Peppering, headphones on, in front of the Kroger when a car pulls up beside her. She keeps her head down as she was taught to as a child, her eyes on her dumb sneakers, keeps her feet moving. The car is keeping pace. She is approaching the stoplight at the corner across from the Hampton Inn, and she will have to wait. The car actually turns right and stops in front of her. The window is down and she sees that it is Rhett. She reluctantly removes her earphones.
“You should get in,” he says. “Let me take you home.”
“I’m just out for a walk,” she says, avoiding eye contact. She does not want to get in the car more than she has ever not wanted to do something in her life. She imagines having to prop her legs up on his guitar case.
He lowers his sunglasses to the bridge of his nose. “Ford told me that you were in the hospital. Plus I’ve been driving behind you. The whole back of your head is stitched up.”
She feels betrayed by Ford and by her head. But she also does feel a little woozy, and it’s at least a mile and a half more to the Vista Mews sign. She feels certain, in her bones, that the woman with the bird socks will still be lying there.
She climbs in. The car is neat and has a plug-in that smells like flowers. She realizes that her mind has populated Rhett’s things with fraternity paraphernalia: red Solo cups and vape pens and date-rape drugs.
Rhett’s sunglasses are still down near the end of his nose, and he is turning left onto Main Street. She is staring at the side of his face when he says, “I know you don’t like me.”
She sighs loudly. “No, I don’t.” The breeze coming through the car window is pleasant on the back of her neck, though.
“You should still let Ford go to Costa Rica.”
“You stay out of my business,” she says, feeling bold. Feeling like, fuck this guy.
“Ford is my business.”
The audacity of it, or maybe it’s the truth of it, drives hot blood into her face.
“Can you turn off the radio,” she says, and turns to the window to hide the tears that have sprung into her eyes.
He does as she asks, and the sound of his turn signal fills the car. “How many kids do you have?” she asks.
“Twelve,” he says. “I’m kidding. Five.” “You can’t get me to laugh,” she says.
“I’m not trying to get you to laugh. I’m worried about your stitches.”
He sounds genuinely concerned, and maybe even sort of funny, all of which she dislikes. “I’ve sat through your children’s sermons,” she says. “The one about the armor. The breastplate of righteousness. Do you subscribe to something that gives you those metaphors?”
“Metaphors are helpful.”
“Kids don’t even know what breastplates are.”
“They know what it feels like to be in a battle. Life is hard, you might have noticed.”
“You don’t know me. Stop trying to act like you know what my life is like.”
“I know you came to church because you were struggling.”
Her eyes fill with more tears. “You weren’t even here yet. Or born yet.”
“I had seven kids already.” He tries to catch her eye, but she won’t let him. He faces forward. “I was in seminary. I went to school for this, you know.”
“Big deal,” she said. “We all went to school.” She gestures vaguely out the window at the educated.
They are at a stoplight, and he turns to look at her. She tries to face him. She wonders what he sees when he looks at her, if that’s some-thing she wants to control, if she even can.
“Look,” he says, “the battle metaphor makes sense to them be-cause kids know they have to choose a side.” He says this gently, as if revealing something she wouldn’t want to hear.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. To think of the world like that, a thing with only two sides.”
“There’s being on Ford’s side, and there’s making an enemy of Ford.”
This almost hurts her, but she pictures deflecting it, as if off a breastplate. “What is it we’re meant to picture? Satan and his band of drug-huffing, murderous, coveting assholes on one side? And – ”
“And Jesus on the other,” he finishes. “But the opposite of Jesus can be many things.”
“Do you picture me as the opposite of Jesus?” Her question is so sincere that it surprises her. She wonders how many days she’s sat in that pew and they’ve all looked at her doubt, as obvious as her pajama bottoms.
“Of course not,” he says.
And then she is crying again, in earnest, in heaving sobs. She looks out the window to see they are in the CVS parking lot.
“Do you have a prescription you need to fill?” he asks gently.
She nods, wiping her nose with the cuff of her sweatshirt. He goes to the drive-thru, where he pays for her pain pills and antibiotics.
When they get to her house, he wants to come inside, help her to bed, but she won’t let him.
“You should take a pill and sleep,” he says on the doorstep.
“Wait,” she says. She leaves him there and goes inside to get her checkbook. She makes the check out and hands it to him, doing it quickly so she won’t have time to change her mind.
When she wakes up, it is dark. What day is it? Where is Ford? Her cell phone is in her hoodie pocket. It’s 7:34. She has seven unread text messages. One from the Women Who Worship, letting her know they dropped off some soup. A text offering her 20 percent off a sports bra. Patrice, checking in on her, four times. Is she okay? Is she sleeping? Ford got off to school fine. After school, he’ll be at the Carson’s for the Halloween party. How about now? Is she okay now?
She thought the party was going to be at the church. She pictures Ford in the basement of the Carson’s house, with the Carson boys, spinning some empty bottle of alcohol. She pictures him using “get laid” in a sentence down there. Ford is full of alcohol in her mind. It could kill him, how much he is drinking. Or it could lower his inhibitions, amp up his base impulses. She doesn’t know or can’t remember even what Ford’s Halloween costume is. For all of her worrying, she doesn’t know the most basic thing. How does she picture him? An angel. A devil. A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. He is hers, no matter who he is. Though he is Ford, has always been Ford. She never got him a cell phone because she didn’t want him to rot his brain on an app or inadvertently invite a child predator into their neighborhood. Now she can’t reach him. She feels the swirl of dread like a flock of starlings over their houses.
She stands alone in her kitchen, hears the ticking of the clock, the wind. She wants the sense of some higher power here with her, but she can’t quite summon it. The house’s emptiness feels like logic, a comfort. She knows whatever is coming is coming. Some way, some-how, Ford will leave her. She feels her legs beneath her, stronger than they were three weeks ago. She wishes she could pray, that she believed it would work. She hopes that when the next thing comes, she will be able to bear it.
Beth Staples’ work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, NELLE, Bat City Review, Phoebe: A Journal of Literature, and Portland Review.