Free Traps by MacKenzie Bezos Page A

sits at the table heaped with Kleenex, her feet in the red flip-flops hooked behind the spindle legs of one of the old woman’s chairs. The white-noise machine lies on its back among her things, its cord still wound tight around it. It is light now through the panes of glass, and she is watching Lynn at the counter stuffing leathery leaves of kale into the clear plastic blender. She steadies a bunch of spinach with her loops of metal and twists and tears off a handful from the pretty white roots and stuffs these in too. A cable pulls the metal loops open and closed. She pins an avocado to a wooden board and slices around it with a big knife and squeezes it free of its pit and then empties the mess of creamy yellow-green in on top. A handful of blueberries. A whole banana. And then she twists open a cloudy jug of apple juice and pours it in over everything. The brown juice trickles down as she lays the rubber lid on top and punches the button with her thumb, setting the blender whirring loudly and clouding with white and bubbles and little pieces that soon disappear. Vivian watches, sipping her coffee, and Lynn watches too, her back to Vivian under the cover of a noise too loud for talking over, until it shuts off on its own, silent now, and full to the brim with pale green.
    “Breakfast,” Lynn says.
    Lynn pours it into two glasses, so thick. When she sets one down in front of her, Vivian thanks her and watches her take a long drink and then set it down and wipe at the corners of her mouth with thumb and ringed forefinger, still standing. “I have to go off in a while to pick up a dog at a shelter about an hour’s drive from here. I’ll teach you a couple things before I go, and you can rest while I’m gone.”
    “You mean I can stay?”
    “ ’Course you can.”
    Vivian’s eyes fill. She laughs nervously and wipes them.
    Lynn turns her back and cranks the faucet on.
    Behind her Vivian says, “I thought you wouldn’t want to take me with the babies.”
    “You kidding?” She picks up a sponge and begins rinsing the blender. “You’re a better bet with them. There’s no harder worker than a single mom.”
    “But I thought you’d have questions about me at least.”
    “Lord, no.”
    “You don’t want to know anything?”
    “Not a bit of my business. And I’ll thank you not to ask me any more questions either. All we need to know about each other is who fed the dogs.” She is busying herself with the blender, soaping it to cut through the avocado and then rinsing it and setting it upside down in the drying rack. When she turns, Vivian is looking down into her full green glass.
    Lynn says, “The diner in town serves burgers at lunch and bacon at breakfast.”
    “This is better for me, I’m sure,” the girl says, still gazing at it.
    Lynn reaches across the pile of used tissues to grab the glass. “I’ll put it in the fridge for you for later. We’d better get started outside.”
    She loans the girl a pair of rubber boots and an old brown canvas barn coat then, and she leads her for the first time into the dog yard. The dogs rush them and crowd, barking and sniffing at their knees, a couple jumping up with their muddy paws on their coats.
    “Oh!” Vivian says, and “Hello there!,” laughing and petting the big dogs who jump up to sniff her face.
    Lynn says, “First thing is, you have to turn away when they do what you don’t want, and only pet them when they do what you like.”
    “Okay,” Vivian says, laughing nervously. The paws of an old yellow Lab are up on one shoulder of her coat.
    “You can cross your arms too, to say no.”
    Vivian crosses her arms, and the Lab slips but jumps up again.
    Lynn says, “And if they keep at you, you can walk away.”
    They start to walk then, with the pack of dogs crowding them, tripping on one another, and Lynn and Vivian tripping too, both of them laughing a bit, but Lynn knowing which dogs she can reach and pet and talk to in a high sweet voice and