Page 36 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

No one has ever included me in a Tuesday. No one has ever handed me half a sandwich, a numbered jar, and a jar of fish flakes, expecting my participation. It’s the small mundanity of a normal life. No one has ever thought I’d want to be involved in such things.

But I want that. Exactly that.

I want the jars and the radiator and the pencil in her hair, the fish’s significant flakes, the church-basement scent crisis and its sequel. The large matters have my whole biography. The small ones, it turns out, were the overlooked asset all along.

She walks me to the door at ten, unlocks it, and stands on her toes to kiss me, tasting of the coffee she shouldn’t drink this late, and says, “Same nose next batch?”

“Standing appointment.”

She grins. “Excellent. Be right out.”

I wait on the sidewalk, while she locks up behind me, two bolts and the bar, and through the glass she waves with the pencil still in her hair. The tank light glows behind her in the dark shop, and I walk to the car, having concluded the most profitable meeting of my day.

13

LUNA

I’m four days late,and I’m a person who is never late, in any sense, for anything.

My body runs on the same schedule as the rest of my life, twenty-eight days, reliable as the radiator, trackable to the morning. I do track it, because tracking things is how I stay ahead of things. Because of this, I have known since Sunday, but have been in denial.

I’ve been declining to officially know, which is a skill I learned early and have kept sharp the way other people keep knives. You can hold a fact at arm’s length for a remarkable amount of time if your arms are strong, and mine have been in training since I was eight.

Monday morning, I feed Hairy and tell him about the weather, and I know exactly what I’m doing while I do it, and I do it anyway.

Ignore the problem, and it won’t swallow you whole.

He hangs at the front of the glass with his whole attention, the way he does every morning of our lives together, waiting for thebriefing. So, I give him a cold front and a forty percent chance of rain and nothing else, and he works his little mouth at me as I walk away, like he’s trying to tell me to tell him everything.

But I can’t. I can’t even tell me everything. How the hell am I supposed to tell a fish?

The wrongness of it follows me to the stockroom. For four years, that fish has gotten every detail of my life. The Hugo years, the lease panic, the night my mother’s recipe box turned up in a flea market and I had to sit down on a curb just to be able to breathe when I saw her handwriting again. I still don’t know how it ended up there, but I knew it on sight.

The box was some vintage thing from Betty Crocker with the metal corners worn down from how she opened it. Inside was her buttermilk biscuit recipe and dozens of others, but it’s the biscuits that I missed the most. I made a batch that night and ate them while crying, which is a feat.

I’ve started keeping secrets from my goldfish. That can’t be healthy.

I reorganize the back stockroom instead of addressing the issue. All of it, every shelf, a project I have been saving for a slow February, executed on a Monday at a velocity that would concern an organizer.

Wicks by gauge, then by supplier, then by gauge within supplier. Jars rotated, counted, and recounted when the count comes out fine the first time. Oils and dyes and perfumes, all categorized and labels-out and in order by bottle height, flavor theme, and my mood. Which is to say, I’ll probably need to reorganize it all again soon.

There’s a rhythm you can get into where the hands run the whole operation, and the brain is permitted to sit in the back seat with the radio off, and I ride that rhythm for three hours, and it works. Kinda.

Cherry appears in the doorway at eleven with a clipboard she isn’t using. She doesn’t say anything at first. She watches me alphabetize essential oils that have been in scent-family order for four years, and she leans against the frame. Cherry’s silences have a wattage that most people’s speeches don’t, but even she eventually gives up pointed silence for words.

“Luna.”

“I’m fine.”

Fine is how I do everything. In the house I grew up in, feelings on display were never once useful. They were inventory you’d left out where it could be damaged, and I learned to warehouse mine early and thoroughly, and the warehouse has excellent security and no visiting hours.

‘I’m fine’ is not a lie. It’s a policy.

Cherry looks at me for one more long moment, reads whatever is printed on me in the font only she can see, and does the most Cherry thing in her entire repertoire. She nods once, goes back out front, and leaves the door open behind her.

I thought I’d be able to breathe with her gone, but I think she took the oxygen with her. I can’t think much at the moment, and now, everything is organized. I need something else to do.

At lunch, I walk to the pharmacy on the corner. I buy gum, hand cream, a birthday card for no one, and a pregnancy test, in thatorder, arranged on the belt for an audience of a nineteen-year-old cashier who could not possibly care less.