Summer Snow

by Nicole Baart

  I clung to that thought when nightmares danced between the steps of my faltering dreams.

  The bland sense of well-being that I worked so hard to cultivate at home evaporated like water on asphalt in the middle of July every time I made the short drive to Value Foods. The weight on my shoulders, the sense of being trapped, a reluctant prisoner, became heavier and heavier as I drew closer to the scrutinizing eyes at the grocery store. My life, I would think, pulling into the parking lot. And the years stretched out before me as long and gray and solemn as the highway unfurling in the distance. There was nothing ahead but more tired towns, more of the same limited opportunities for a woman in my position.

  At work, I found it difficult to hold myself so delicately all day long, to live with the understanding that this was my present and my future. It was hard to accept that everyone knew what I had done and assigned value to me as a person because of my stupid mistake. I was effectively labeled, with or without the scarlet letter. So in the beginning I tried to make myself invisible, avoiding conversations and even eye contact, feeling sorry for myself and regretting the decision that was really not a decision at all.

  Sadly, it didn’t take a degree in engineering to know that my attempts at invisibility were about as effective as trying to stop the tide with outstretched hands. At the six-month mark, I gave up trying. I stopped sucking in, let my shirt hang loose, and tied my apron in a slack knot above the round ball of my belly. The effect was almost silly: the stiff canvas of my royal blue apron hung in a straight-edged A-line that could have been the front of a sandwich board. I almost wanted to write cryptic messages across the fabric. Maybe “Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder.” Or “True Love Waits.” But then again, such sayings made my heart snag as if pricked by a barbed hook.

  Graham was the only person at Value Foods who treated me as if nothing had changed, as if I was the same Julia he had met back in February. And I suppose I was the same person, though I couldn’t help but find it strange that fourteen-year-old Graham, mature beyond his years, could look past what I had done to still see who I was. I don’t know if he asked Alicia to arrange it or not, but we seemed to work together all the time. And his simple decency was the one thing that got me through every day.

  Once he said to me, “You look pretty today,” and I shrank defensively because I was sure he was rubbing salt in a wound. But his smile was authentic and his eyes reassuring, and I had to accept that he meant what he said.

  “Thank you,” I managed after a moment. It struck me that it had been a very long time since I had heard such gracious words.

  “You think I don’t mean it,” Graham said. “But I do.” And then he offered to stock shelves for me so that I could take his position bagging groceries behind Alicia. I was forced to interact with more people that way, but it was much easier on my back. I gave him the sort of smile that is intended as a gift.

  That Thursday evening seemed to commence a tradition, and for many Thursdays to come, Graham, Alicia, and I worked together with Alicia and me handling customers up front while Graham bent and stood, lifting boxes in my place. Alicia acted a bit weird around me, but she didn’t avoid me the way some other employees did. I knew that malice had nothing to do with how they dodged my company; what does one say to someone in my position? I could barely think a thought to myself without becoming sad or offended or at the very least reminded of the many concessions I would have to make. I wasn’t bitter that my coworkers steered clear of me. I would have done the same thing in their shoes.

  But Alicia, like Graham, was different somehow. She wasn’t overly friendly like he was, but she also didn’t act as if she were afraid of me, as if pregnancy were contagious and I might infect her with an ill-timed sneeze. Instead, Alicia seemed wary and a little too cheerful and bright, almost forcefully irreproachable and full of wide-eyed naiveté. Maybe I was being far too presumptuous, but she gave off the impression that my situation hit a bit too close to home for her comfort. She exuded a generic fear, a feeling of it could have been me. But she was courteous; she chatted with me between customers and never stared at my stomach, and working with her came in second only to working beside Graham.

  When I showed up for work the last Thursday in May, I had forgotten that Graham would be playing his tuba in the band at his high school’s graduation ceremonies and that Alicia was off for the entire week. The sight of Michael feeding a new roll of cash register tape through the till in the first aisle made my step falter. A wish like quicksilver sparked through me, and I yearned to race home and call in sick before he saw me. But the hum of the automatic door betrayed me as I entered, and Michael looked up from his task, fixing me in his gaze and giving me a slow, uncertain smile.

  Michael was the one person I had rarely worked with since the day my pregnancy was brought to light. It seemed his face would forever be fixed in my mind with the blank, stunned expression he had shot my way as I dragged Simon out of Value Foods all those weeks ago. Rumor had it that he was very busy with the classes he was taking at the local tech school, and Graham told me that Michael had secured a scholarship at the University of Iowa for the coming fall. Apparently he was entering the premed program.

  Those outrageous dreams that I tried to silence surged quickly, wildly, at the news, and without pausing to think, I imagined what it would be like to go with him. In a different world, one without a baby, a place where there was such a thing as a new beginning, I wondered if Michael could have ever seen something worth pursuing in me. Maybe we would have clutched hands like Thomas and Francesca, made plans for the future as we worked side by side toward individual goals. But we barely knew each other; there had never been anything between us. It was pathetic to let such a thought flash through my mind.

  I hoped my random musings hadn’t made me blush, and I tried to make myself smile decorously when Michael lifted his hand in a halfhearted wave. “Hey, Julia,” he called. “Long time, no see.”

  Not knowing what to say, I merely nodded in agreement and kept walking toward the back of the store to punch in and hang up my purse. I wondered who else would be working with us and hoped earnestly that it wasn’t Denise. Contrary to my experience the first night I worked at Value Foods, there were only four people who were typically scheduled to work the evening shift. The wrong mix of people could make for a miserable couple of hours. I had become dependent on my nonthreatening Thursday routine.

  Walking through the aisles, I caught a glimpse of Monica, the Value Foods gossip, standing with a new worker, someone I had never met before. He was heavyset with huge, timid eyes behind plastic-framed glasses, and I startled him nearly out of his skin when I passed the aisle he was crouched in.

  “Hi,” I said, offering him my hand. “I’m Julia.”

  “Hi,” he said back, but he did not tell me his name. His fingers were soft and limp, and he pulled his hand away quickly. When he slipped away from me and disappeared around a corner, I let myself chuckle. I could tell that he wasn’t disturbed by me; he was just high-strung or maybe a little intimidated, as I had been when I started at Value Foods.

  So no Denise, no Alicia. And no Clark as far as I could tell.

  “Who’s the shift manager tonight?” I asked Michael softly, approaching him after I was settled in. I hated to do it, but there was no one else to go to.

  He was giving a middle-aged woman correct change, and when he had counted the last dollar into her outstretched palm, he turned to face me. “I am.”

  It was impossible to hide my surprise.

  Michael shrugged casually. “Denise quit; didn’t you hear? I guess she’s going to live with her aunt in New York. Thinks she’s going to get some gig off Broadway.”

  I smiled at that.

  “Off off Broadway. Way off,” Michael joked, then stopped himself with a thoughtful tip of his head. “She was a nice enough girl, just had some crazy ideas.”

  Though I didn’t think Denise needed him to defend her, I found it charming that he wante
d so badly to find the good in people. Maybe he would do the same for me.

  “Anyway, they asked me if I’d like the position. Pays more, who would say no?”

  “Not me,” I said, sounding as stupid as I felt.

  The conversation abruptly came to a halt. We stood in awkward silence for a few moments as we glanced around the store and tried to think of more to say. Other than a brief hello in passing, we hadn’t really talked since our short-lived flirtations, and I felt clumsy and confused trying to reconnect now. Trying not to feel embarrassed for extending my attentions as I kept my secrets, my shame, to myself.

  “Well,” I finally said, deferring to his authority and hoping to put an end to such an uncomfortable encounter, “what would you like me to do?”

  To my utter surprise, Michael patted the counter in front of him. “Stay up front with me. I mean, not with me, just up front. And I’ll be here too. …” He looked uncharacteristically shy for a moment, but he shook it off with an easy smile. “When it’s not busy, I’ll start mopping the aisles and you can work the counter, and when it is busy, I’ll bag groceries and you can ring people in.” His gaze dropped for a moment, and then he peeked up and added, “I thought that scenario might be easier on you.”

  A little flustered, I cleared my throat. “Thanks, Michael. That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  He waved off my gratitude. “Not at all. Somebody has to run the cash register. Besides—” he patted his stomach—“it’s almost swimsuit season. I gotta take whatever form of exercise I can get.” He meant it to be funny, and he smirked at his own joke. Then his eyes registered the shape of my abs, the body that wouldn’t see a swimming suit this summer, and he froze. “Oh, Julia, I’m—”

  I laughed a lighthearted little laugh and brushed off his attempt at an apology. “Don’t be ridiculous. If you want to look like me by the time you’re invited to your first pool party, you’d better get started. It’s not easy maintaining this awesome bod.”

  Michael looked shocked for a moment, and then a grin unfolded across his face. “You are something else.” He was shaking his head at me, but there was a quiet admiration in his eyes. “Sorry I’m such an idiot.”

  “You’re not,” I assured him.

  I tried not to be, but I was even more attracted to Michael because of his sweet consideration. And though I felt somewhat guilty about doing it, I allowed myself the odd glance at him as he mopped the floors and slid groceries into clear plastic bags. He wasn’t like Thomas at all—there was no posturing self-assurance, no promise of protection that elicited both comfort and a feeling of vulnerability in me. Nor was he like Parker—determined and overly confident, capable of making me believe that I, too, could be as driven and successful as he planned to be. Instead, Michael was himself, separate from me and yet not unconcerned or indifferent toward me. He was kind. He treated me like I was worth something in and of myself. I didn’t feel manipulated or needy. I felt respected. I felt … nice.

  We closed up together, and I stayed longer than I needed to because I was content and not in a hurry to leave Michael’s company. We didn’t talk much, but it was all right to just know that whether or not he thought I had made the biggest, dumbest mistake of my life, he didn’t plan to hold it against me. Though I had avoided him more than anyone else at Value Foods, he was turning out to be more perceptive, more genuine, than even the sensitive Graham. Graham had a way of making me feel that deep in the very heart of his kindness he held the smallest seed of pity. I didn’t get that from Michael.

  When we locked the front doors and emerged into the night, the air was warm and moist, the humidity prophetic of what was to come: a summer of unseasonable heat, of blistering asphalt and sweat that beaded like an otherworldly crown along damp hairlines. It felt wonderful. The night wrapped itself around me, soft against my skin, and when a breeze stirred the leaves that were still silky and pistachio-colored in their newness, I looked up. Smiled.

  “Night, Julia,” Michael said.

  Swinging my purse from the very tips of my fingers, I tossed it upward in a carefree salute and tried to thank him without words. “Good night, Michael.”

  I thought about trying to say more, about letting him know how much I appreciated his kindness, but I wasn’t ready. Not yet. It was more than enough to have had a few hours to feel like myself: Julia, just Julia, without any addendums, postscripts, or footnotes.

  He whistled as he walked away, waving over his shoulder and melting into the shadows of the parking lot.

  I watched him go until he disappeared completely and then turned my face to the sky, hunting for the light that had leaped out of the darkness at me only a few heartbeats ago. And there it was, between the countless blossoming branches: the moon. It was far away and small, but also full and bright, and though there were no shadows, no halos of hope in the light, it was gleaming and brilliant and gloriously white.

  Secrets

  “‘HI. I’M EMILY ELIZABETH and this is my dog, Clifford.’”

  I could see by the way Simon’s eyes brushed over the pictures that he wasn’t reading at all, wasn’t even looking at the words. “Hey,” I said. “You have that line memorized.”

  Simon glanced up at me with a look of disdain. “All the Clifford books start that way. I don’t have to read the first page.”

  “But I don’t care if they all start that way or not, Simon. I want you to be able to read the words.”

  He snorted as if taking great offense and turned the page with a sharp toss of his fingers. “Just watch,” he asserted. “I know how to read the whole book.”

  Though it was true that there were certain words Simon always got right—Clifford, dog, the, and, to—the list of vocabulary that he could routinely recognize was actually still very small. During our morning sessions there were a few words that we could sound out together, but most of them I had to flat out tell him. I doubted if we were making any progress, and I could see his frustration beginning to show as we plodded through book after book.

  We had barely turned the page when Simon came across emergency long and baffling, and he didn’t even try to tackle it. He shrugged a little self-consciously and skipped right over it, probably hoping that I wasn’t following along and wouldn’t notice.

  “Emergency,” I said, stopping him. I pulled apart each syllable and moved my index finger under the word as I carefully repeated it. “E-mer-gen-cy.”

  When Simon didn’t parrot me, I wrapped an arm around his dark head and gave his hair a quick kiss. It smelled sweet, like he had touched his messy mane with syrupy fingers. We had feasted on waffles for breakfast yesterday. I smiled and breathed him in. “Sick of it?” I asked.

  Simon flipped the book closed. “No, but why can’t we read my Clifford books?” he complained, scraping at the library sticker on the back cover of the book he held.

  “Because you know them by heart,” I answered. “I thought you wanted to learn how to read.” Then, flicking his fingers lightly, I added, “Don’t do that. You’re going to pull it off.”

  He sighed and wrinkled his nose at me, abandoning the book and instead scratching a spot near his temple with ferocious energy. “I do, but it’s very hard. I don’t know lots of words yet. How many words are there, Julia?”

  I laughed, dumbfounded at his question. “I have no idea. Lots and lots. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands, I suppose. Maybe millions.”

  Simon’s face crumpled at such an unachievable number.

  I rushed to soothe him. “Oh, don’t worry, Simon. You don’t have to know them all.”

  “Do you know them all?”

  “Absolutely not. I have a terrible vocabulary.”

  “Vocabulary?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him good-naturedly. “You know the word pregnant, but you don’t know vocabulary?”

  My half brother shook his head solemnly and dropped the book on the floor so he could fold his legs underneath him and face me on the couch. He took a strand of my hair between
his fingers and began to twist it from the base all the way to the tip of his pinky. It was a strange habit that he had picked up during our informal reading lessons. I usually showered before bed, twisting my hair into a loose bun while I slept and letting it down to air-dry when I woke. In the morning my hair was still slightly damp. It had grown outrageously thick as my pregnancy progressed, and the limp natural wave in my usually boring brown tresses had tightened into gentle curls that I hoped remained even after I gave birth. One morning Simon had touched a lock as it hung over my shoulder, and apparently he liked the heavy, cool feeling of the dampness in his hands, because he reached for my hair more often now.

  “Vocabulary means ‘all the words you know,’” I said, trying to explain. “Does that make sense?”

  “Yup,” Simon said, but I doubted he was paying attention anymore. I let it go. One of the things I had learned early on about trying to teach a preschooler was that his attention span lasted for about the duration of a single book. Much more and he became silly and unreasonable.

  “Come on. What letter does vocabulary start with?” I prodded. “Get it right and I’ll make you a smoothie. V-v-v-vocabulary.”

  “V,” Simon said with relish, hopping off the couch. “Do we have peaches or raspberries?’ Cause I want a peach smoothie.”

  I followed him into the kitchen in time to see Grandma emerge from the hallway that led to the rest of the house. Simon wrapped himself around her middle in a brief, tight hug and then all but leaped toward the freezer, flinging it open and searching for the bag of frozen peaches.