Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  “I’ve never eaten in here,” she said, looking up.

  “Seems like a good time to start.” I sat on the matching settee across from her and set down my own mug. “I hate that I’m leaving. I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Maybe I could come over with the kids later. Sarah would love to see you.”

  “That’d be nice.” She didn’t sound convincing or even as if she’d really heard me. Her eyes were in the box, her fingers rifling through objects inside.

  “I think Paul said he’d only be gone four days this time. We could go back up to Hat Creek after that.”

  She removed a tiny piece of crochet work from the box. I wasn’t sure what it was—a cap of some sort, perhaps, or a little lace collar. She held it up against the pale light from the window for a moment, then laid it on the sofa beside the shoes.

  “I don’t think I’ll be going back,” she said.

  “What?”

  “To Hat Creek. I don’t expect I’ll want to go back.”

  “Why not?”

  She looked back into the box. She removed a pair of crocheted booties that had perhaps once been pale pink, holding one in each hand. She ran her thumbs over the undulating stitches that had once touched the tops of her baby’s feet.

  “I think I told you once that the whole reason I went there is because it’s the place where my family was together.” She caressed the booties for a moment more, then set them on the sofa. She still hadn’t looked at me. “That’s changed, now. Now it’s the place where my family came apart.”

  “Tuah—”

  “Could you get some sugar? I think I want sugar in my coffee this morning.”

  The faint light from outside shone through her hair, the cloud-gray wisps that had escaped the loosely wound braid at the base of her skull.

  “Okay,” I said.

  *

  Sarah sat at the kitchen table, hunched over her cereal bowl, kicking her feet, and flipping pages of the mythology book.

  “That’s the chair that pulls the sun across the sky,” she said, pointing to the picture of Apollo.

  “Chariot,” I said.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Kevin said. “The earth goes around the sun. The sun doesn’t move. The earth does.”

  “Nah-ah,” said Sarah.

  “Does, too.”

  “It’s in the book.”

  She was clearly arguing for the sake of needling him. A day started that way was not headed in a direction I wanted to go. I needed to intervene. “Remember how I said these were stories people made up? Just stories. Like if you said the reason you have clean clothes is because an elf washes them.”

  She squinted a grin at me, cheeks puffed around a mouthful of cereal. She wiped a dribble of milk from the corner of her mouth. “You wash them.”

  “That’s right. And I think it’s time I showed you how to wash them yourself.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I spread a spoonful of jam across my toast, then carried it and my coffee cup to the table. She flipped a page.

  “That’s the man who got stuck looking at himself,” she said.

  “Now that might really happen,” I said.

  “Nah-ah.”

  “Okay, maybe not. But there are a lot of people who spend too much time looking at themselves.”

  “Miss Melanie,” Kevin offered.

  “Who’s that?” I took a bite of toast.

  “She was my mom’s friend. She worked at the hair place.”

  The offhand way he brought up his mother’s life was something I hadn’t seen before. “Did you used to see her a lot?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Do you miss her? We could go see her.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Nah. It’s okay. She wore red lipstick and tried to kiss me.” He made a face.

  “You need to tell me or your dad if you ever think of people you want to see.”

  “Okay,” he said, scooping a mound of cereal against the side of his bowl.

  “Smaller bites,” I said automatically.

  He spread his mouth open as far as he could, added the cereal, then mugged at me with his cheeks and lower lip swollen from the contents. I had to laugh.

  “Okay,” I said. “Funny once.”

  I sensed an ease about him I didn’t think I’d seen before. Then I remembered something Paul had told me.

  “You tried to find your mom’s secret place yesterday, didn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Yup!” Sarah crowed, kicking harder.

  “Did you find it?”

  “Nope,” said Kevin, with no trace of disappointment.

  “I caught a fish!” Sarah said.

  “Wow! You went fishing? Did you catch any?” I said, looking at Kevin.

  He held up two fingers. Gave a sly smile.

  “And Kevin stepped in the water!” said Sarah.

  “So you had a good day with your dad?”

  Kevin nodded while Sarah bounced in her chair. “It was the best day in the whole world!” she said.

  I looked at Kevin. He met my eyes with a faint smile, then looked back down into his cereal bowl. I had to catch my breath. At Tuah’s house, only sorrow. Here, a ray of light. Until yesterday, it had been the other way around. And would be again, certainly. The threads of joy and sorrow, light and darkness, blessing and grief were woven together too tightly to tell one from another.

  Sarah went back to flipping pages, two or three forward, one or two back. “That’s the girl getting borned out of her daddy’s head. That doesn’t really happen.”

  “Nope. Not at all.”

  Another page.

  “Those are the girls that sing and make the sailors crash. Why do they do that?”

  “Just causing trouble. You don’t ever want to be like that.”

  “But it doesn’t really happen.”

  “No, but you want to stay away from girls who just want attention.”

  She didn’t seem interested in a morality lesson but continued flipping pages.

  “And that’s the one with the jars of good and bad things,” Sarah said, pointing to the picture of Zeus overlooking humanity in all its insignificance. “It doesn’t happen like that.”

  I looked at the picture, sideways to me and shimmying slightly as Sarah kicked and jiggled the table. The white jar of blessings, the black of curses. My father’s way of viewing things. We needed a different picture, a different story: joy and sorrow, light and darkness, blessing and grief, all coming from the same place. We needed Tuah’s magpie jar, a way to explain that nobody really knew what anything was.

  “Well, it kind of does,” I said. “But there’s more. Right after they made this picture, a kid was running around and knocked over the jars.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m making up a story. Right now. We’ll say it was a girl named Sarah.”

  “Did she get in trouble?”

  “No, nobody saw it. Not even her brother. Because he would’ve told on her.”

  “Nah-ah,” Kevin said. “I would’ve helped her.”

  “You’re right. Let’s change the story. Sarah and Kevin came running through the picture because …” I cast around for a moment. “They were chasing puppies. Lots of puppies. And the puppies were wrestling and they knocked over the jars.”

  “That could happen,” Sarah said.

  “Exactly. The puppies knocked over the jars, and the blessings and curses spilled out and made a big mess. Like sand, everywhere. And the puppies were running and rolling in it, and Sarah and Kevin were yelling at them and trying to get them out, but by the time they were done you couldn’t tell what was what. All the blessings and curses mixed up, and some of them had spilled over the edge.” I pointed at the picture, where the gods’ patio hung over the edge of the mountain. “So they fell on the people way down in the valley.”

  “I bet that dad would be ma
d,” Sarah said, looking at Zeus in the picture.

  “Oh, you bet. So mad. He wanted to control everything, and now people had stuff happening to them that he didn’t plan. So Kevin thought he’d make things better by cleaning up. He got a broom and swept up all the mess because he’s really great at sweeping. Especially in kitchens.”

  “I don’t want to sweep today.” Not a fool, that boy.

  “No, you’re great at it. Nobody does it as great as you.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Yuck,” he said. But his objection was automatic and not delivered with much effort, and he returned to chasing the ribbons of sugar at the bottom of his bowl.

  “And Sarah’s amazing at mopping.”

  “I love to mop!”

  “I know. So those are our chores after breakfast. Anyway, Kevin gathered everything together, swept it into the dustpan, and Sarah got another jar to put it in. One jar for everything, good and bad. But here’s where things got really weird. Zeus, the dad”—I pointed to the picture—“kept watching the people so he could figure out who had bad things fall on them and who had good things, so he could fix it if he needed to. But it turned out that he couldn’t tell which was which. Some people had stuff happen to them that he thought was a curse, but it turned out to be a blessing. Other people had good stuff happen, but then bad things came out of it, and then the bad things became good. Then bad again. Turns out that the whole reason the stuff that spilled got mixed up was because it really was the same. Or at least by the time people touched it and messed around with it, you couldn’t tell which was which anymore.”

  I must have gotten unintentionally emphatic as I went on because Sarah’s expression became worried and concentrated. She looked at me scowling, chewing slowly. When it was clear I wouldn’t say any more, she looked back at the picture. “It doesn’t really happen like that,” she said.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “But it kind of does.”

  She stretched her chin to look at the picture again.

  “I like this story better,” she said after a moment.

  “Suit yourself,” I said.

  *

  At the last minute, I called Mindy and Joan to join us for lunch at Tuah’s. Joan wasn’t home, and Mindy said that Alex had woken up early this morning and needed his nap. She wouldn’t be able to stay long but she’d try to be there.

  I made enough peanut butter sandwiches for everyone, got some grapes and a bag of chips, and called the children home from Poppy’s to go on a picnic.

  “Again?” Kevin said.

  “You’ll thank me in January,” I said. “Get in the car.”

  As we passed the park, Kevin said, “Where are we going?”

  “Tuah’s house.”

  “Really?” Sarah squealed, kicking and bouncing her seat.

  “Yup. Just a picnic in the yard. She’s been feeling kinda lonesome, so I thought it would be good to visit.”

  Kevin didn’t say anything. I doubted lunch at an old lady’s house sounded very compelling to him.

  “There’s a great tree to climb,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I hadn’t been completely sure how we’d find Tuah and I was relieved to see her come to the door, dressed and with her hair repinned, while I was getting the food out of the back hatch.

  “Tuah!” Sarah yelled. As she had on the day we met, she ran to my grandmother and threw her arms around the old lady’s hips.

  “Hello, Kevin,” Tuah said. “I think you’ve grown since the last time I saw you.”

  He nodded solemnly. “Yes, ma’am.”

  I pointed to the cottonwood that leaned over the shed. “Climb that,” I said. “I’ll get us something to drink.”

  “I’m okay, you know,” Tuah said as I passed her at the door.

  “Just had to see for myself,” I said. I got an ice tray from the freezer and whacked it against the counter.

  “Losing her was worse.”

  I turned.

  “The hardest part of grief is getting over trying to go back and change things. I already did that. This is terrible, but you need to know there’s relief, too. We can have a funeral now. She can be buried there by Eduardo.”

  “Sure we can,” I said. “Everyone will come.”

  She nodded but said nothing further. After a moment I opened a cupboard for a pitcher.

  “She was perfect. Do you understand that? She was perfect in every way. Every way.”

  I looked down into the pitcher, the countertop tiles wavering through the glass bottom. A human free of judgment, error, malice, grudges, spite, self-destruction, fear, blame. Perfect. I looked up at Tuah.

  “I know.”

  She put a hand on my shoulder, a little rub and a pat, then took the pitcher from my hand. “Go on now. I’ll bring out the water.”

  Mindy pulled up just as I shook out a blanket on the grass. Tuah, unfolding a lawn chair, looked up, surprised. Then she looked at me. Back at Mindy.

  “Good Lord,” she muttered to me. “How much watching over do you think I need?”

  “I just thought it’d be more fun for the girls,” I lied.

  Katy bolted out of the car without waiting for her mother. Sarah, in a low crotch of the tree on its back side, darted out and the two little girls hugged, staggering in a circle together as if they hadn’t seen each other in weeks.

  “Katy, honey, we can’t stay long,” Mindy called after her. Her daughter showed no signs of having heard, and the two girls disappeared together to the far side of the tree. Kevin was already up along the angled limb.

  “Hi, Tuah,” Mindy called as she hoisted the baby out of the backseat and onto her hip, where he kicked and fussed. She slammed the door and came over to greet her, putting her free hand around Tuah’s shoulders and leaning forward to kiss her cheek. “I’m so sorry,” she said as she straightened. “I read about it in the paper.”

  “You’re very kind,” Tuah said. She put her hands on the arms of the lawn chair and eased herself down into it. There was a certain stiffness about her, and I started to think I might’ve done the wrong thing by inviting Mindy.

  “I’ve got sandwiches,” I said, sitting as well. “They’re just in the bag. Kids can grab whatever they want.”

  Mindy eyed the tree. “It might be a while before they think about eating,” she said. “Not too long, I hope. Alex is gonna pop a vein any minute now.”

  Mac shambled around the corner of the house, tail waving. The girls squealed and pulled their feet up.

  “Sarah!” I called. “What are you doing?”

  “Sorry,” Mindy said. “That one’s Katy’s fault. She’s allergic. Gets hives on her hands if she touches a dog.”

  “Oh! Should I put him in the house?”

  Mindy put a hand out to stop me from standing. “No, she’s fine as long as she doesn’t pet him or get licked. I was the same way when I was a kid. Now it’s not so bad, so maybe she’ll grow out of it.” She dropped cross-legged onto the blanket. Alex shrieked and grabbed hold of her neck. “I don’t know where it comes from,” she went on, ignoring him. “Nobody in my family has any allergies.”

  “Your grandma sure did,” Tuah said. “And maybe your dad, when he was young.”

  I shot a look at Tuah. How distracted was she?

  “Really? Grandma Rodel?”

  “Yes, of course,” Tuah said.

  But she was looking at the tree as she said it, the shuddering of leaves and the laughter of the little girls. She looked back at Mindy, whose whining baby now reached for the blanket. She put him down, and he swung his fists out and wailed angrily, then buried his face in her lap.

  “Yes,” Tuah repeated. “Your grandma had allergies. I had another dog when we were younger, and she could scarcely come into my house.”

  “Wow. I never knew that.”

  “I imagine not,” Tuah said.

  “I didn’t know her real well,” Mindy said. “I’d love to hear more sometime.”

  “I suppose. Someti
me.”

  Alex gave another wail, so I don’t think Mindy saw the way Tuah watched her, then had to look away. But not with sorrow. With tenderness.

  “Okay, that’s it,” Mindy said, standing. Alex shrieked again, and she reached down to pick him up. “I tried. Katy’s gonna have a fit, but this guy needs his nap before he explodes.”

  “Let her stay. I’ll just drop her off when we’re done here,” I said.

  “Would you? That’d be great.”

  She called good-bye to Katy, then took the baby to the car and left. The other three children remained in the tree.

  “Are you going to tell her?” I asked Tuah after Mindy had gone.

  “About her family? No, of course not. But I’ll tell her what her grandmother was like. It doesn’t matter who she thinks it was.”

  I leaned back on my hands and felt the grass, cool under my fingers. Kevin, who had climbed higher than the girls, shook a branch above them and they shrieked in overacted fear.

  “I made a doctor appointment,” I said.

  Tuah looked at me sharply. “You did?”

  I nodded. “Thursday. At the clinic. When they found out my dates they wanted to see me soon.”

  Tuah studied me for a moment. “You’re staying, then,” she said.

  I looked down. “A couple people think I could teach high school, but”—I waved one hand over my stomach—“I don’t know how they’d feel about this.”

  “I couldn’t say,” Tuah said.

  “But it can’t hurt to look into it.”

  “No, that’s right.” She shook her head, then looked toward the tree. Laughter cascaded down the trunk and scattered across the grass. She cleared her throat. “You know, I don’t want you thinking you have to be here for me. I’ve been fine before. I’ll be fine. I just have to get used to a different way of thinking.”

  I looked down at my lap, then back up at her. “So do I. Maybe we can help each other.”