Free Still Life with Plums by Marie Manilla Page A

finally opened my eyes what I saw was Maranga. Not on Hector’s canvas, but lining the walls. Dozens of versions of that beautiful cocoa woman, her belly swollen with so much life.
    I became aware of a pulse in my own belly. It was a puzzle and I looked at Hector, so calm in his creation, and Widow Greenbaum, who seemed to understand something about this moment I did not.
    “I must go,” I said with an urgency that surprised me. Widow Greenbaum nodded, but continued to stare at Hector and blot at the corners of her eyes. I doubted if Hector was even aware of my presence.
    Pushing outside I looked up into groupings of stars, bright planets, the edge of the moon, the same moon that sliced the Guatemalan sky. For the first time I was remembering my family instead of imagining them. They were swaying on the porch swing Felipe made when I was pregnant. My daughter snuggled at her father’s right side clutching her frayed blanket. My son curled at his left, noisily sucking a thumb. Felipe would make up stories about Rosa the goat in a rhythmic voice that would lull his children toward dreams, and suddenly Guatemala seemed much farther away than 2200 miles and seven years.
    I found myself standing before Mango’s nursery, my face buried deep in his shrubs. Through the front window I could see him pruning a generous spider plant, offering tender apologies before clipping each stem.
    I peeled a cluster of lilac and held it to my face to feel the lavender blossoms against my lips and inhale the thick sweetness deep into my lungs.
    It was a potion.
    And suddenly I could see myself stepping up onto Mango’s porch, rapping on the door. Under the yellow bug light his mouth would curve into a smile as I invited him outside for a chat. Then perhaps, if the moment was right, we would sit on
his
porch swing along with my ghosts, and discuss his fertile garden, my green thumb, and trade secrets well into the night.

Distillation
    Betty sits in the passenger seat with an aluminum foil swan on her lap. Twisted inside are leftovers of the supper she paid for. She bought Jeff’s too, and now he sits behind the wheel, looking out the front window at the ribbon of I-45 South rushing toward him, at mile markers passing, at the thin strip of pink light on the horizon, as his wife slowly wrings the swan’s neck.
    “I know where you’re going,” Betty says.
    Jeff grips the wheel tighter. “I thought it would give us closure,” he says. “Isn’t that what this night is about?”
    “I don’t have time for this, Jeff. I told the sitter I’d be home by nine.”
    “Sitter-schmitter,” he says, trying to grin at her. Trying to act as if he’s not worried about the babysitter, about scalding bath water, about sneaked-in, child-molesting boyfriends, about shaken baby syndrome though the baby is three and a half. The grin comes off as a smirk in the car’s dim interior and Betty huffs and looks out her side window.
    Jeff settles into the beaded seat cover, the same cover he sat on ten years ago when he drove Betty to Texas City that first time. The samecar, too, a two-toned Monte Carlo he inherited from his father, with 112,000 miles less on the odometer. Without the Juicy Juice stains on the back seat that spot remover would not, could
not
remove even after Jeff’s repeated applications; no sour milk and baby spit smells that still linger though he sprinkled baking soda and vacuumed until every Melba toast crumb, every dried Spaghettio was safely sucked inside the Dust Buster. It was an eager car, then. New tires anxious to eat up mile after mile. Now it’s just part of Jeff’s settlement along with the microwave; the twenty-inch TV; the alphabetized collection of baseball cards that he decreased in value by laminating, but
how else are you supposed to keep them clean!
Betty is selling the house her geological drafting job paid for. She gets the rest of the furniture, the two-year-old Dodge Caravan, and Stephanie. Betty gets