Free The From-Aways by C.J. Hauser Page A

eyes that owl, rimmed in black, with a weird filmy lid that slid back and forth instead of blinking and a white mask like a Venn diagram. His head sat densely on his chest, no neck to speak of, and he did not so much cock his head as rotate it around. The strong yellow curve of his beak barely parted when he hooted, but she was right. My mother in the moonlight, her white nightgown bright in the dark, the soft bulge of her freckled arms exposed to the air, was right. This owl was asking a question.
    I thought about my answer. Who cooks for you? Is that like, Who does your dirty work? Or is it more like, Who loves you? One of my mother’s favorite expressions was Can’t it be both? She resolved all manner of crises this way. I think that was the case with Who cooks for you. That it might mean both of those things.
    “Play me a song,” Rosie says, and slides over. She’s wearing three pairs of earrings, which means today was a dark day. I know she needs more metal when she’s low. A Polaroid of the big-house construction is on the kitchen table. There’s a note scrawled at the bottom, a stamp in the corner. The house is growing tall, taking shape.
    I found the guitar in my mother’s closet when I was packing up the house. Carter’s, for sure. The strings were stiff as hell. Before I left Connecticut I bought a book and a new pack. As the old strings unspooled, the whole body of the guitar seemed like it would fall apart with a groan. But the new strings bend easy now, ring clear. I’ve been getting better, practicing while Rosie is at work. I’ve even been working on a few songs of my own. Scrawling lyrics and chords in a little green notebook. I sit next to Rosie and take the guitar.
    “I can’t, really.”
    “Frankly, we’re beyond me believing such crap,” Rosie says. She’s wearing gray sweatpants, rolled at the waist, and her hair is tied back with a red rubber band. “Sing to me.” She rests her head on my shoulder, and I realize that Rosie is deeply sad these days. Outside the sun is going down an hour earlier than it used to. Rosie has weathered nineteen Menamon winters. She knows another one is coming for us now.
    But damn if Marta Winters didn’t ruin me for life. If loving her didn’t magnetize me so I cleave to the crazy ones with sad streaks a mile wide. The birdcallers and the Polaroid senders. The late-night wanderers and radio song requesters. I reach my arm around Rosie and pull her close. I smooth her hair down. I tug on her ear. “Not the best day?” I say.
    “Just the same, you know?”
    And I know what that’s like, because it used to be that way with Marta and me. How after she was gone, an enormous question mark floated behind my eyelids. The way it seemed impossible to wake up and do the same little necessary things all over again and how the best thing to do was not to question it. Because if you questioned it everything seemed hopeless and got you down real low.
    I could tell Rosie everything I know about survival mechanisms, but what I really want to tell her is that I don’t feel that way anymore. That since I came here, to town, to her house, every day I wake up clutching this private feeling of excitement like a rag in my fist. I wake up, realize where I am, and a jump start goes through my heart, like, What will she say today? Will she make me eggs? Will I buy her a drink? Will she touch my shoulder and will I think about that for days and days? Because I know that, even though half of this town is in love with Rosie, I’m the one who can love her best. The one who gets her and knows what she needs before she even needs it. The one who will cook for her. I feel a rumbling in my chest like the first pull of a lawn mower, the vacuum before the roar. Because I can’t let Rosie know this. Because I don’t want her to know and then feel bad that she can’t give it back to me.
    “All right,” I say, adjusting the guitar. I play her an old tune of my father’s, all the way