In a minute the door swung open and Mama entered with a hurried air. She reached into the cabinet for a glass and then opened the refrigerator. She moved around the kitchen, pulling out the milk and pouring it into the glass. Where the back of her mother’s shirt had once been neatly tucked in, it was now undone. The strange disorder of the line unnerved her. Mama set the glass of milk on the table.
“What did you do to the muffin? I can’t understand what has gotten into you today,” Mama said, and bent down to gather the larger pieces off the floor.
Gulp after cool gulp of milk finally washed away the salt. Her father entered the kitchen and walked over to the stove. Before she could warn him, he took a muffin from the tin and bit down.
She saw him gag before throwing the entire thing into the trash.
Mama turned around and saw him wiping his mouth.
“It’s good,” he choked out before walking over and taking her glass of milk to wash out the taste.
“It is?” Mama asked.
Dad smiled too happily for such a disturbing event. “I have to grab some paperwork, but then I’ll be right back,” he said, and leaned in, kissing Mama below her ear.
“Come here, bug.” Dad leaned down and placed his forehead on hers, smiling into her eyes. He tapped her nose three times, quickly, their silent signal for the words I love you. All the sadness over the muffins disappeared with Daddy’s touch.
“Why do you have to leave?” she asked. “Why can’t you just stay?”
“I will be right back. So fast you won’t even miss me.”
“That is not the truth.” She scowled. “I know how many minutes it takes for you to drive to the lab and back.”
Daddy grinned at her. “You do? How many?”
“Thirty-three minutes without any traffic and much longer if there are cars on the road.”
“How did you get so smart?”
She remained scowling.
Dad placed the palm of his hand on top of her head. “I promise when I get back, we can take a walk to the playground. Then get pizza for dinner and—”
“Ice cream cones afterward?”
“Yes, my love. I promise you ice cream and rainbows and all the stars in the sky. I promise I’m going to make everything perfect for you.”
“Okay,” she said, holding out her pinkie. “Remember what you promised.”
He linked his pinkie with hers and then he was gone. The sudden absence of him left her confused. She thought about running out to the car and making him stay. She would gladly give up the playground, pizza, and ice cream if he would just stay. But she knew he would probably tell her she was being Unreasonable. Parents used that word a lot when they didn’t want to do what you wanted.
She watched the door for a second more, hoping against hope that he would return magically, but when he did not, she turned back to her mother, who was crouching on the floor and picking up the rest of the crumbs from the smashed muffin.
“You asked me to make these for you all morning, and then this is what you do.”
She thought of Daddy and his promises and stayed silent as Mama chastised her for being ungrateful and threw the remnants of her poor behavior into the trash. Mama walked over to the stove and unconsciously reached over, breaking off a piece of another muffin and placing it in her mouth.
She rushed to the sink and spat. With her head lowered, her hands gripped the edge of the counter. Then slowly Mama straightened up and the heel of her palm rose up, pressed into the side of her head. She stood there, still and silent, the shadow of her raised arm cutting across the floor.
She stared over Mama’s shoulder at the window, where the wind was whipping back the trees, their once-straight frames cowering and hunching over. The sky darkened. And then tiny white dots floated through the air. Right before her eyes, they proliferated, flooding the window until all that remained was white. A snow globe’s swirling fantasy.
Mama screamed.
The violence of the cry, hard as a kick to the gut, made her jump in fear. She raised her knuckles to her mouth and stared at her shrieking mother.
Mama leaned forward, bending at the waist, hands on her knees. She screamed again. A howl so deep it seemed to crawl across the floor like a wild animal clawing its way to bite her.
She stepped back.
Then Mama was all motion, arms flailing as she threw muffin after muffin into the trash. Some she smashed, fisting them in her hand before heaving them away. Mama swung her body back and forth, grabbing at anything, the muffin tin, the wooden spoon, the towels, the teakettle, anything within reach. Mama began to heave it all against the wall, the floor.
She began inching toward the door when Mama’s eyes found her. Mama’s eyes lasered into her and she could not move.
Spring
I’m frozen in my place at the sink, my reflection in the window directly before me. Behind me, Dad moves through the kitchen, talking about tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, which is just as good as pizza and how they are exactly the same except in a slightly different formulation. He rattles on, discussing the lab and how the new recruit is moving out here to work for Dr. Mendelson. The surfer wunderkind that Dad went to see in Australia. Sometimes our past conversations played over and over again in a Möbius strip.
I look into the darkness of the night transforming the
