Kathleen unfastened the wood button holding her gauzy blouse together, exposing her milk-swollen breasts. With her long hair parted in the center, her domed forehead and regal smile, she could have been a Madonna, with Ana in her arms a baby Jesus.
“Who’s the chick?”
Three young guys, probably students, crowded around Eddie. The one wearing a fringed scarf knotted at his throat nodded at the poster Eddie had hung on the Print Shop’s wall replacing an Andy Warhol soup can.
“That ‘chick’ is the Queen of Heaven but she could be my wife.”
“For real?”
“For real that’s a late-fifteenth century Virgin and Child by Rogier van der Weyden.”
While the students craned their necks and jostled Eddie’s elbows, Eddie gazed upward at the poster, noting how the Virgin’s expression combined tenderness and authority. Like Kathleen’s when she nursed Ana. Her red robe fell around her shoulders in carefully rendered folds. One bare breast touched Jesus’s cheek, echoing its roundness.
The boy with the scarf leaned close to Eddie’s shoulder and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Kinda outa place maybe?”
Posters of peace signs, rock concerts, vaguely psychedelic art nouveau posters by Alphonse Mucha patchworked the Print Shop’s walls. Pop art by Roy Lichtenstein, female nudes by Modigliani. Einstein sticking out his tongue. John and Yoko in bed.
“Isn’t she lovely though?” Eddie had hung her where he could keep his eye on her throughout the workday. “I’ve seen the original at the Chicago Art Institute. The colors are richer than in this reproduction, and you can see the tiny brushstrokes. That’d be something to have, a painting like that. Imagine it being yours to look at every day.”
Eddie hoisted the ladder onto his shoulder and left the students gawking at a different poster farther down the wall: Twiggy in red suede. They could have her. Across the shop, under a banner—Original Artwork for Sale—Knox was showing three girls his photography. They stood close together, peering at the grainy black and white images. One of them, a Black girl, had her arm around Knox’s shoulder and was twisting her fingers in his frizzy blond hair. No one ever bought Knox’s photographs. No one bought Eddie’s sketches of flowers and fruit, either. Not even after Knox labeled them Nature Morte.
Eddie lugged the ladder toward the backroom until a tall redhead in a polka dot dress blocked his way. She was like a giraffe, with gingery eyelashes. She touched Eddie’s arm, blinked, and pointed to a poster on the shop’s back wall.
“The Kiss by Gustav Klimt,” Eddie said. “You want it for your dorm room? Mmhmm. You’ll find a bunch rolled up in the cardboard box marked K.”
When Eddie turned back to the ladder, there was Knox in his ratty denim jacket, his camera hanging from a strap around his neck.
“What happened to your friends?” Eddie asked him. “Are you going someplace?”
“I wanna go out and shoot the scene.”
Eddie looked past Knox through the Print Shop’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Out on Telegraph Avenue people streamed past, going south.
“What are we protesting now?” Eddie asked Knox.
“Not protesting this time. Creating a park where they tore down those rooming houses.”
“Those were nice houses and they turned the block into a swamp with old cars.”
“No cars now.” Knox grinned. “Got a dozer down there grading it as we speak.”
“I don’t think the university’s going to allow a park there.”
“Over-thirty defeatism!” Knox lightly punched Eddie’s shoulder.
“They’re planning on dorms there. Or a soccer field.”
“We’re gonna make something private and ugly into something public and beautiful. They’re asking local merchants for dough to buy roll-out sod. I took a twenty from the cash register.”
“What a way to run a business.” Eddie shrugged. “I guess we can close early.”
“Cool.” Knox made his long, thin hands into a megaphone and hooted, “Everyone out! We’re closing shop!”
Eddie locked the cash register. “You don’t care about lost income because you’re on your own. In the commune we pool our paychecks.”
“Don’t let them give you a trip, it’s only dough. You coming?”
“No, I’ll head home. Those were nice houses.”
“Full of ‘hoodlums and shakedown artists,’ according to the senile dictatorship. The chancellor lies, they all lie.”
Eddie and Knox watched the last customers file out of the shop.
“Maybe,” Eddie said. “I wish the commune would buy a house instead paying so much rent, but some of us don’t believe in private property.”
Knox raised his right hand, flashing Eddie the peace sign, and pushed out through the glass door to join the three girls on the sidewalk. They hadn’t bought any photographs from Knox but maybe they hoped to be in his new ones.
Eddie turned out the lights, rolled his bike onto the sidewalk and locked the door. People strolled past, not rushing, a peaceful bunch, maybe stoned, in jeans, bellbottoms, long skirts, miniskirts, army jackets, some shirtless men, some barefoot women. Eddie pedaled homeward against this tide of humanity, smiling as he wove his bike through the crowd. With any luck Dennis and Kathleen would still be at the playground with the girls, the others at their different jobs.
Three blocks on, Eddie rode up to a low wrought iron fence and dismounted to open the front gate. He detoured around the pile of weeds Beth and Sue had left in the middle of the path. Another of Mae’s little graves had popped up in the herb garden next to a real dead guppy laid to rest by Cassie last week. Between the mint and the rosemary Mae had buried a porcelain dog and then a plastic horse. And now something else. Four popsicle stick crosses tied with yarn marked the small mounds of soil.
Eddie bumped his bike up the brick steps and opened the screen door. Someone, likely Sam, had neglected to close the front door on his way out. Eddie rolled his bike into the living room and leaned it against the bookcase.
“Hello? Anyone in?” He ambled into the dining room and threw his keys and wallet into a wooden bowl on the table. Nice to be alone for a change. In the kitchen, water dripped into the sink. Eddie tightened the faucet handles. On the kitchen table, beside a crumb-shedding, half-eaten loaf of wholewheat bread—one of Dennis’s doorstops—Eddie’s sketch of a rosebush wore a coffee ring. Someone had been thoughtless. Eddie sighed, opened the refrigerator and chugged cold unfiltered apple juice from a gallon jug.
On top of the refrigerator five clay pots on newspaper waited for the kiln. Their curved forms were very Kathleen. With half-closed eyes, Eddie ran his finger down the tallest, finest. No wonder people paid good money for Kathleen’s work. She was too modest to call herself an artist, but these objects were more than practical pots.
After Eddie put back the jug and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he scanned the headlines on the latest copy of the Berkeley Barb, left on the kitchen table by whoever had stained his sketch with a coffee cup. Dennis probably, reading the alternative paper to show how progressive he was though he wasn’t really that political. They’d all participated in civil rights marches, free speech protests and antiwar demonstrations, but when Eddie observed that the hairy unwashed masses turned him off, Dennis hadn’t disagreed. Plus, the war went on and on; America was violent and ugly, and at times protest seemed pointless.
“Only through small group efforts can society improve and change permanently for the better,” Dennis had said. Hence the commune. “Our community must be consciously anti-bureaucratic, rejecting hierarchy and actively forging emotional bonds between all its members.”
They all agreed: We’re for love, not war. Let’s create a safe place to raise our babies. Let’s bake bread, plant a garden, make art.
Eddie picked up the sketchpad and frowned at the coffee-stained pen-and-ink drawing of rosebuds on thorny stems. Ruined, but not quite right anyhow. With his wooden box of art supplies and the pad of paper Eddie went out of the kitchen and down the shaky backstairs into the garden. He walked between the vegetable beds, traversed the weedy lawn and sat down cross-legged on the brick path. Decades ago, a previous owner or tenant had planted four old-fashioned rosebushes tough enough to survive neglect. Their musky scent attracted fat, furry bumblebees. Maybe he’d add a bumblebee to his new drawing.
Eddie took several pencils and a sharpener out of the wooden box. He removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, opened them and rested them by gazing into the distance. At the bottom of the garden Mae rambled around, plucking weeds and flowers. She broke up red roses with her two hands and scattered them into the playpen under the fleshy-leaved magnolia tree. Ana grinned at the petals cascading over her head, and Dannie clapped her hands. The girls hadn’t gone to the park after all, or were back early. Where was Kathleen? For that matter, where was Dennis? Had he flaked off somewhere, leaving Kathleen on her own with the girls? Dannie began to eat rose petals, while Mae walked on bare feet along the brick path at the bottom of the garden and vanished behind the bamboo clump.
Eddie scooted forward on the seat of his jeans to keep an eye on the little girl. Didn’t want her climbing into the hot tub and drowning. Could Kathleen be in the hot tub?
Mae stopped where the water hit the ground, smack, smack, smack. The brick patio around the hot tub was puddly. The little girl squatted to watch the water funnel into the cracks between the bricks. Nearby, clothing lay scattered on the brick. Eddie scooted farther along the path. There was Kathleen in the steaming tub. With Dennis. Copulating. By the look of it, but maybe not, surely not.
Eddie squinted at the two figures moving as one. He put on his glasses and stared. Kathleen’s long hair fell back into the water, her neck was arched, her face tipped back to the sky, while Dennis, wedged, apparently, between her legs seemed to grasp her by the waist under the water, pulling her forward and backward. She must be light in the water, her ass on the slippery redwood bench. Dennis would be standing. Not thrusting so much as bringing her to him and away, her hair moving like seaweed in the tide. Not taking her so much as using her, like using his hand. Or—standing there, Dennis might’ve been standing at a workshop table working on something, a woodworking project. Dennis was busy with his Kathleen project, working away on her, sawing away. She was one of Dennis’s things. She was a thing that belonged to Dennis.
But she was his. Eddie’s. His wife. His Kathleen. What should he do? Behind his glasses, tears filled Eddie’s eyes. He should do something, stand up from the ground, reveal himself, shout and wave his arms, interrupt them, stop them, run down there and tear them apart, punch Dennis in the face, scream at Kathleen: How could you?
The rhythmic motion made waves that splashed over the edge of the redwood tub. And there by the puddles was little Mae. What were they thinking, the pair of them? Had this happened before? Was Mae used to it? She slapped the puddle with her hands, squatting, her feet wide apart, chin raised, face averted, avoiding the splashing water. Her eyes changed when she saw Eddie’s face above the rosebush. She smiled. He gestured for her to come to him, away from that. If she hadn’t seen yet, he must spare her.
Mae stood, long-legged in an adult’s tie-dyed t-shirt worn as a short dress. Up the meandering brick path she came until it ended at the shaggy lawn, near Eddie.
“Hi, Mae.”
“Hi.” Mae knelt, looked into Eddie’s messy box of pens and pencils, bottles of ink, stubs of chalk and pastels and selected a piece of blue chalk. She crawled a little way off and drew on the brick path, while Eddie glared at the pair in the hot tub. When had this thing started? Dennis had been at home during the day for three weeks, no, a month now, since the manager of Mexicali Rose had fired him for dropping plates. That long? And why? Why had it started? Kathleen loved him, Eddie. She couldn’t love Dennis.
“Once upon a time there was chicken and a cat and a dog and a duck and they all made pie.”
Eddie glanced away from Kathleen and Dennis at Mae “Did they? What’re you drawing there?” Eddie asked Mae. “A chicken?”
“A blue chicken? Silly Billy.” Mae crawled over and put her little hand on his. Could she feel it trembling? “No, this is the wind roaring across the darkening sky.”
Eddie peered over at the blue scrawl on the brick. “It’s very nice. Would you like to go in for an orange juice pop?”
“Okay.” Mae stood up. Her bare legs were dirty and now chalky.
With shaking hands Eddie put his art supplies back in his wooden box and went up the stairs and into the house. Mae followed.
In the kitchen, Eddie set Mae on the tiled counter, gave her an orange juice pop from the freezer and stood gazing past her shoulder, through the window, at the bamboo screening the hot tub from the house. If Dennis had seduced Kathleen, he’d no doubt used words, not deeds. What could he have said? We need to unlearn our conditioning. He often said that. Not referring to sex and marriage, but Eddie could imagine. No one owns you, Kathleen. Dennis would’ve said something like that. Come on, girl, you’re no one’s property. He could be persuasive, and Kathleen hated saying no to people. She might even have told herself Eddie wouldn’t mind if he found out she was playing around, or not mind too much, because possessiveness in marriage was corny and obsolete.
“Mae! Where are you?” Dennis’s voice came from behind the bamboo clump. “Mae?” Dennis emerged in cutoffs and leapt through the plants, ignoring the curving brick path. His long hair flew back in ropy wet strands as he jogged across the lawn and up the wooden steps into the kitchen.
Mae kicked her bare heels against the cabinet below the tiled counter and giggled. “Hi, Daddy. You’re wet.”
“Eddie?” Water from Dennis’s hair trickled into his eyes as they widened with surprise. He grabbed a dishtowel and scrubbed his face, hiding it in the cotton. “How long have you been home?” he asked in a muffled voice.
Long enough to see you taking my wife in the hot tub, sonofabitch, Eddie would have said but not in front of Mae.
“The Print Shop closed early. Another demonstration on Telegraph.” The words he spoke seemed to come from somewhere above his head. “We thought it better to close.”
Not completely true. He’d wanted to be alone. But he hadn’t been alone, hadn’t had the place to himself. What if he hadn’t come home early? What if he hadn’t caught them at it?
Dennis lowered the dishtowel, frowned nervously at Eddie, then turned to his daughter. “Mae, you scared me.”
Eddie’s gaze remained on Dennis’s lean brown face. The man was supposed to be his best friend. Or if not best, closest. Literally, in that crowded, thin-walled house.
The screen on the front door squeaked and lightly slammed. Cassie called out. “Hello?”
Cassie! Eddie hadn’t had time to think about Cassie yet.
“Hey, cool, you’re here, Dennis! Eddie, hi!” Cassie blew in, breathless. “I’ve come from this most amazing scene near the campus. We’ve taken over the block where the old cars used to be. We’re making it into a garden. I’m going to take some plants.”
“That must be your demonstration,” Dennis said to Eddie, rubbing the dishtowel over his bare chest and down his arms.
“We closed early,” Eddie explained to Cassie in that same disembodied voice.
“Uh-huh.” Cassie reached up to unfasten her barrette, gathered the tumbling blond hair in both hands and reformed the bun at the back of her head. She clicked the barrette, patted her hair, smiled at Eddie, evidently seeing no evidence of trauma in his face. “Liz’s there and Sam’s coming after he picks up Ben from kindergarten. We all left work. This is more important. We’re feeding free food to folks who help, so I should take some beans or bulgur. Can you start some, Dennis? It’s beautiful. Like what we’re working for here, like the commune, no leaders, and everyone’s included, longhairs, professors, freaks, students, housewives and kids.”
“Doesn’t the university own that block?” Dennis asked.
“The people own it now. The university forfeited that right when they neglected it.”
Had Eddie neglected Kathleen, putting his art and job before his marriage? Leaving Dennis to take advantage and comfort a lonely housewife on a weekday afternoon?
Cassie babbled about lilacs blooming where old cars had rusted, about food bubbling in big tubs, the spring sun shining, recorder music warbling, kids and dogs playing, until Eddie wanted to scream shut up. A park for the people? Cassie was fooling herself. The university wouldn’t let that scrap of land go without a fight.
Kathleen entered the kitchen from the backdoor, combing her fingers through her wet hair. “Mae, there you are. Cassie. What’s going on?”
“Kathleen! Come back with me to the park. That vacant lot? We’re putting in a garden, paths, swing sets. We need our shovel and trowels. I have to admit I miss being a student. It’s so cool getting caught up in something again.”
Kathleen looked at Eddie, a shadow in her eyes. “You’re home early.” When she had her period, her eyes looked pained like that.
“We closed up early.” He’d been wrong to imagine her justifying or downplaying her disloyalty. She knew he’d mind or she wouldn’t look at him that way.
“Okay, Cassie,” she said. “Sure, I’ll go with you. After I nurse Ana.”
Dennis busied himself measuring bulgur and water into a pot, shifty-eyed and silent. Cassie kissed Mae on her cheek, lifted her down from the counter and smiled at Dennis. The poor woman had no inkling Kathleen and Dennis were messing around behind her back. But then neither had he. Eddie shoved his fists into his jeans’ pockets.
Kathleen went out and brought Ana back to the house in her arms, Dannie toddling behind. She nodded for Cassie to set Dannie in the indoor playpen and sat on the worn velvet armchair to nurse Ana. Eddie leaned against the bookcase, hands crammed in his pockets. Dennis, discreet for once, remained in the kitchen while the others watched Kathleen pull the muumuu off her shoulder. Eddie’s Madonna. Just last night, she’d nursed Ana at the dining table, and Eddie hadn’t minded.
Kathleen unfastened the wood button holding her gauzy blouse together, exposing her freckled breasts, swollen with milk. Across the table, Dennis chewed on a drumstick, his gaze flicking over at the heavy, hanging breasts, while jealous little Dannie scowled and complained with her mouth full of chicken: Numm, numm!
Eddie might’ve objected, too: For god’s sake, Kathleen, do that somewhere else. Instead, he’d sipped his beer and smiled. What had he been thinking? Only contented, complacent thoughts: Look what is mine. My lovely wife, my beautiful babe.
Ana, cradled in the crook of Kathleen’s arm, reached up to touch one of Kathleen’s hoop earrings. With her fat hand she fingered the silver hoop and laughed until milk dribbled out of the corners of her mouth. Look what is mine, Ana seemed to be thinking.
And Dennis watched too, chewing chicken. Thinking—it was obvious, now—: Look what is mine.
Eddie tightened his fists in his pockets.
“Poor Dannie’s mad Ana gets the breast and she doesn’t anymore.” Cassie turned to Eddie. “You okay?”
Eddie nodded, while Kathleen lifted Ana to her shoulder to burp her.
Cassie clapped her hands together, rose from the couch. “Guess I’ll go dig up some plants.”
Cassie could be heard running down the backstairs into the yard. Kathleen shifted Ana to her other breast. Eddie was alone with her, not counting the kids. He still had to keep his mouth shut though. At least he no longer had to keep his expression neutral. Kathleen glanced up at him and frowned when she caught him glaring at her. Eddie’s heart pounded harder.
“I’ll help Cassie.” Kathleen stood up with Ana.
Eddie pulled his hands out of his pockets and took the baby from her.
“Thanks.” She the muumuu up over her shoulder. “What?”
Eddie shook his head. If he opened his mouth now, he’d shriek at her, or choke up. Curse or cry. He needed to be alone to process his feelings. After Kathleen left the living room, he sat down on the couch with the baby splayed froglike on his chest. When would he speak to Kathleen? When would he accuse her? When would he let his grief and rage pour out? So much pain, waiting to be released. What about Dennis? When would he confront him? And how? Eddie stared at a crack on the ceiling with the warm weight of the baby on his chest and tried to see himself challenging Dennis and Kathleen at circle-time, hashing it out in front of the others. How would that work?
“Eddie!” The screen door squeaked. He’d been alone with his thoughts no more than a minute. Eddie turned his head as Sue stepped into the living room followed by Beth.
“You left work early too?” Beth asked him.
“Coming to the park?” Sue’s feather earrings quivered beside her cheeks. “Exciting, huh?”
“Hey, lazy.” Beth poked his shoulder. “Help us load the car?”
Eddie lay the sleeping baby in the playpen with Dannie and followed Sue and Beth out to the garden where Cassie stood surrounded by clumps of green strappy leaves, roots like fleshy white spiders, dirt clods everywhere.
“I’m gonna edge the lawn with this agapanthus, give the iris to whoever wants to plant it. See, at the park no one’s in charge, no one supervises. If you have an idea, you act on it.”
“Can I plant a corn patch?” Beth asked.
“It’s up to you!”
“How about sunflowers?” Sue asked.
“It’s up to you!”
Half an hour later Cassie and Kathleen drove away in Cassie’s Toyota, the backseat heaped with plants and gardening tools, the pot of bulgur wheat wedged in. Beth and Sue followed on their bikes. Eddie closed the front door and went into the kitchen for a drink. Dennis was still there, unfortunately, with Mae, letting her help rinse and turn the jars of beansprouts. With his face averted from the pair of them, Eddie reached down a glass from a shelf. He opened the freezer, grabbed a bottle of vodka and poured himself an icy drink, ignoring Dennis and Mae. He slugged down the vodka, poured another. Behind him Dennis slurped something, made a considering sound, slurped again. Tasting one of his concoctions, normally chatty but silent today, avoiding Eddie as much as Eddie was avoiding him. Probably wondering how much Eddie had seen. And what about Cassie? Eddie returned the vodka bottle to the freezer. Was Dennis worrying about what Eddie might tell Cassie?
The pots on top of the fridge wobbled when the freezer door slammed shut. Kathleen’s hands had shaped those curved vessels into hips, breasts and bellies. Dennis’s hands had moved over the real deal, her soft round body in the hot tub, her pale shiny-wet flesh.
A butcher knife lay in the sink. If Eddie stayed in the kitchen, he’d be snatching it up in a second: Stab, stab. On his way out he grabbed a loosely corked bottle of white wine, about half-full, from the counter. He ran with it down the stairs to the backyard and rushed on blindly, stepping into a hole recently occupied by irises and twisting his ankle.
“Damn it, Cassie,” Eddie muttered and hobbled down the slope until he reached the magnolia tree at the bottom of the garden. There, he sat on the dusty ground and leaned against the trunk. He pushed the cork out of the bottle with his thumb. It bounced on the ground and rolled away out of sight. He swigged from the bottle.
Poor Cassie, happy in her ignorance. Though maybe she wouldn’t mind her spouse’s infidelity or at least not as much as Eddie did. Cassie didn’t believe in private property.
And yet—Eddie raised the bottle, making a point—a park isn’t a person. If the people took the land from the university, so what? The Indians owned it first. The university’s land title was stained with blood.
Eddie saw the others around the circle nodding: Right on, Eddie, right on. The land didn’t know who owned it, the land didn’t care, but—and here the other faces faded away and only Kathleen’s remained—the land was passive, it had no say in who owned it, but Kathleen had chosen Eddie and so she was his, not communal property up for grabs.
He’d tell Kathleen that, if he ever got her alone.
Eddie chugged tepid wine, lowered the bottle, concentrated on a dried leaf near his foot and saw almost at once: No circle-time drama, no hurting Cassie. She was so excited about this park business, about the commune, looking forward to a bright future with Dennis and Mae. Why spoil it for her? Time would do that without Eddie’s helping. Nothing precious lasts long in this world.
Tears blurred the dried leaf beside his sneaker. He drank from the bottle again. No telling Cassie and no confronting Dennis either, because he couldn’t trust Dennis not to tell the others. Dennis advocated openness. And who would look the fool when the truth came out? Dennis the seducer? Or Eddie, square, bourgeois, thirty-one last March. Old fogey. What if they laughed at him?
Eddie swigged wine, nodded. No more talking. He was done with powwows. Instead, he and Kathleen would drop out of the group without giving the real reason why, just say they’d changed their minds. Kathleen would have to comply. She owed him. Whatever he asked for. Even that.
“The commune? This utopia we created together in our big, shabby rental house? This idyllic place where children play in a garden while their parents make arts and crafts, read and write, smoke grass in the sunshine? We’re walking away from it.”
It would break Kathleen’s heart. Well, she’d broken his.
“Eddie? Eddie!”
Eddie scooted around on the dirt. Mae, treading down the backstairs with one hand on the splintery railing, was calling his name.
“Eddie?” Her blue chalk drawing stopped her on the brick path. She studied it, then hopped over it on two feet, bounce, bounce, and looked around the garden. “Eddie? Want to draw with me?”
Eddie groaned and lay down on his back with his arms folded behind his head. The empty bottle rolled away from him. He closed his eyes. Maybe Mae wouldn’t find him behind the tree.
“One, two, three…” Mae counted. “Ready or not here I come!”
Silent on bare feet but breathing loudly through her mouth, Mae came nearer and nearer.
“I found you.”
Eddie opened his eyes but did not sit up.
Mae had followed the winding brick path down the slope. Now she put her hands on the playpen and looked inside.
“My roses.” Mae leaned in as far as she could reach, scrabbling her fingers on the plastic sheet. Eddie watched her through slitted lids. Let her think he was sleeping. Beneath him the hardpacked dirt spun. He must be drunk.
“For Eddie.” Mae padded up to Eddie with two handfuls of red rose petals and scattered them over him. “Rest in pieces.”
RIP. Was death the answer, then? To cease to breathe, to find peace in the garden? The petals landed lightly on Eddie’s t-shirt. His chest went up and down, because he wasn’t really dead, just pretending. Some of the petals slid off.
Mae put her hand on her hip and looked around. Eddie’s slitted eyes followed her as she squatted to pick up two sticks from the ground under the magnolia tree. She held them together in a cross. If she had a piece of yarn or even a hair ribbon or a shoelace, she could tie them together. Then she could poke the cross in the ground by Eddie’s head. But Mae, wearing only her daddy’s t-shirt, had nothing to tie the sticks with. She might’ve gone into the house for a piece of yarn, instead she dropped the sticks back onto the dirt.
“No cross for Eddie.”
With half-open eyes, Eddie watched Mae squat by a juniper shrub and pick up the wine cork that had rolled there. She sniffed it, then chucked it down and walked away, leaving Eddie lying alone on the turning earth.
Simone Martel is the author of a novel, A Cat Came Back, a memoir, The Expectant Gardener, and a story collection, Exile’s Garden. Simone was born in Oakland, CA. After studying English at U.C. Berkeley, she created and operated an organic tomato farm in the Central Valley. She’s working on a new novel based on that experience.
High Horse 