Free Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw Page A

Styrofoam cups with half-moon holes punched in the tops.
    He’s panicked. She has just told him she can’t see him anymore until after the baby is born. She meant to say she can’t see him again ever, but she had a last-minute failure of nerve. She is sure that in two or three months he will be onto something else, maybe even another town, and she will be safe. Right now, though, she’s not safe at all. She’s trying to rescue a flailing man while going under herself.
    “You could come with me,” he says.
    “I’m not going anywhere.”
    “I could come up with something wonderful,” he says. “We could go to Florida. I could skywrite over those long beaches full of college kids. You could teach swimming at a hotel pool. You could teach the sidestroke to old ladies. We could eat fried fish dinners and go to the drive-in for a movie at night.” This is a scheme pulled straight out of his desperation, but she knows he’ll punch it up into real life around her if she gives him a chance.
    “The baby,” she says.
    “The baby would be our papoose. We’d put her in a backpack and bring her along. Wherever.”
    But there is no wherever for them. At this moment, Jesse feels a sharp catch beneath her breastbone, the price exacted for creating this thought, the thought of really never seeing him again. She also feels a lilting relief. She is standing in a red velvet and sequin bathing suit, inside the exploding burst of magician’s smoke. When it clears, she’ll be gone.
    ***
    They’re having Thanksgiving at Hallie’s this year, more or less by default. Jesse, who usually has it at her house, has been too frayed and short on sleep with the baby, who has turned out to be a happy and easygoing, but nocturnal creature. Having the dinner at Frances’s was out of the question; she’s a notoriously terrible chef. And everyone agreed Alice spends enough time in the kitchen the other days of the year and should be able to just put her feet up for the holiday. She and her lover, Jordan, have been invited on the condition they don’t complain about lumps in the gravy.
    It turns out to be a particularly fun afternoon. The balance is just right. Frances comes by herself. Darrell is off at one of his daughters’ in some extremely backwoods Arkansas hollow, where the traditional holiday main dish—Frances informs them as though Darrell is from another country—is fried wild hare.
    “Road kill,” Jesse says under her breath to Neal.
    Frances is totally taken with Alice, considers her sophisticated for being from Kansas City, and a restaurateur. This fascination takes her attention off Jesse and Hallie, who she doesn’t enjoy seeing together. Today though, they can just hang out in the steamy kitchen with Hallie doing the real cooking while Jesse takes the easy jobs—cutting the canned cranberry jelly into slices, folding the Cool Whip into the Waldorf salad—while extending a toe to jostle Olivia, who sits cackling in her bouncer. Neal watches football on TV in the living room with Willie, who enjoys the game for what must be reasons of his own, since he can never find the ball in any given play.
    After a while, Willie comes back, wanting the baby, making gimme signs with his outstretched hands. He is quite proprietary about her. Not that he thinks she is his, in the sense of being her father. It’s more like he assumes Jesse has brought Olivia into the world for him.
    “Okay, okay,” Jesse says, and pulls her daughter out of the contentment of her bouncer and hands her up to Willie. He adores the baby, is serious and overly careful with her.
    When the turkey is out of the oven and cooled down a bit, Neal comes back into the kitchen to wield his electric carving knife. “A man’s job,” he says in a bogus macho way, waving the buzzing knife over his head.
    They all take places on regular chairs and folding ones brought up from the basement, wedged in next to each other in Hallie’s small dining room. Frances, who