Excerpt - Cherry Snow

He didn’t realize in that first year just how much of a toll the move from Bison to Roc City had taken on Jude. They had both grown up there, on opposite sides of Bison, but he had little family or life left there when he managed to get his first job out of college that paid more than just enough to make rent each month. It was an actual job, a job with a suit. She had to help him tie his tie for the interview, he was so nervous. They celebrated that night when he was offered the position – Assistant Operations Manager of Strategic Resources – it rolled of the tongue with an air of importance. They went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant after Jude got one of her sisters to watch the kids. That was the last time for a long time he saw her as happy as that, if he managed enough time to see her at all. The hours were cruel, and the commute even worse. Too many hours behind the wheel dead tired, having to pull off to the side of the road so he didn’t slip into sleep and veer into oncoming traffic or slide off into a ditch. He stayed at a hotel in Roc City a few times in the first few months. They had to wait until he was able to get some vacation time in order to house hunt. It took them a few weeks to finally find a place – an American Four Square on the southwest side of the city.

The house was so much larger than their apartment back in Bison. Four bedrooms, a front porch, a two car garage. The kids found endless amusement with the laundry shoot and attic room that was just paperboard and no insulation, something he’d end up tearing down when the kids outgrew the need for a private place they were willing to share. On a weekend a few months after they had moved in, Peter built a sandbox for the kids to play in by the fence at the back of the yard. The children loved to play there, and Jude liked that she could see them through the kitchen window if she had to prepare dinner while they were outside playing. And they would play for hours in the cicada buzz of summer evenings, well into the dusk. He and Jude would sit on the back steps and watch them run around, pulling dandelions from the edge of an unkempt garden thick with ivy and patches of grass where they hadn’t the time to plant anything.

An older black couple lived in the house whose driveway ran parallel with the fence. They had raised their kids already, were enjoying a quiet retirement, the wife tending to a well manicured garden, the husband often washing his ’57 Bel Air – a car he had saved all his life to own and enjoy, Peter found out one random summer weekend while they shared a few beers along the fence. Peter was out grilling some hamburgers for the family dinner. He was enjoying a can of Piels and offered one to his backyard neighbor waxing the hood of the Chevy and working up a sweat. They got to talking and found out they had a lot in common, especial an interest in golf. A sport Peter was desperate to improve upon to impress the brass at work, the company often taking clients out to The Oaks Country Club in an effort to woo them into a contract.

The man’s name was Clarence, his wife’s was Bella. They had lived in that neighborhood for over forty years. They bounced around a few houses around Roc City but they always felt like that neighborhood was home. Their family was a quick walk or car ride away. They would have Sunday brunch with extended relatives on a regular basis. He used to work at the factory on the north east side making film, but the company exported the jobs. He managed to work long enough to collect a pension, but for the last ten or so years before he retired, he had to work three low paying jobs to maintain the income level he had before they laid him off. Clarence was a nice man, but Bella was a bit crass.

After so many years working as a cleaner, she was very particular about how things were kept, how clean a room should be, how well kempt a garden should look. Bella would often be around weeding her garden when the kids were playing in the sandbox. One day the kids were as excited and exuberant as ever, running around and throwing a ball around. It managed to get away from them and over the fence into Bella’s garden, damaging a rosebush she prided herself on. Jude was in the kitchen making dinner and didn’t see the woman scolding the children. It was Desiree who came in screaming crying to her mother. Jude heard the whine and sniffles growing as Diz ran the length of the yard through the slap of the back porch screen door into the kitchen to cling on Jude’s leg and bury her face in Jude’s apron. She peeled Desiree away from the sopping wet spot on her jeans and asked what had happened. Peter had just gotten home and had placed his briefcase on the kitchen table when Jude handed the little girl off to him for consoling and stormed out to confront Bella. He watched through the window as the two woman argued over the fence. The twins were wrestling each other over the ownership of the ball.

He didn’t hear the entirety of the conversation. He had to move closer to the screen door of the back porch to catch anything cohesive. What kind of mother lets their kids run wild, I would never let my children terrorize the neighborhood like that, destroying gardens, he heard Bella say. She pointed out the damaged bush to Jude. Look, you crabby old witch, he heard Jude reply. She was on her own there trying to keep an eye on their children and make dinner for him, a husband working twelve hour days. A man she rarely gets to see or able to enjoy his company because of his schedule and the tending to the children. She didn’t know anyone in this city, that all of her family was back in Bison, too far to offer to watch the kids while she cooked dinner every night. And God forbid that someone who has raised children and knows the difficulty might offer her a helping hand in keeping them in line instead of traumatizing them for being children to begin with.

Bella stood there, taken aback. Jude turned around to the twins still fighting each other over the possession of the ball. She called their names and they froze, dropping the ball between them. She told them it was time for dinner and they had to wash up. They ran to the kitchen where Peter was cradling Desiree. His daughter’s arms were around his neck as she sat on his forearm. The twins bolted in, the screen door slapping closed behind them. The little metal latch hook tapped a few times before it stopped. Each of the boys hugged one of his legs on their way to the downstairs half bath to clean the dirt they had collected on their arms wrestling over the ball. Jude was making her way back across the lawn. He could see the tears in her eyes.

That night they talked about how she felt. How she felt alienated, that the neighbors looked at her with furtive derision in sideways glances. She told him how unhappy she was and it would be a long time before she felt better about their new life in Roc City.

He explained this to the circle of people around him. He didn’t tell the group much else. Just that he found it hard living in that big house with only a cat and the occasional visit from his son Rusty, who had been to a few of the sessions with him. Russ was the only child he had that still lived in Roc City. The two would go each month to Mount Hope Cemetery and lay a flower on Jude’s headstone. A man sitting next to him rubbed his shoulder to console him. He was tearing up. He knew now, sitting amongst all these strangers, how alone she must have felt. How terrible it was to find the one you loved absent from your life when you needed them the most.

Roc City Blues excerpt - Cherry Snow

Growing up, he never thought of death or loss. There were no expectations of him, thus he had no expectations of life beyond its constant continuation. Death was something abstract, a historic event that only occurred in a previous time, before he had existed, or a prophecy – fictitious, written in a forgotten language, translated and retranslated into and from various languages over the centuries, an anxiety unfounded and easy to ignore through the distractions of day to day living.

It wasn’t until his maternal grandmother’s funeral that such a monster in the closet as death was to him became a reality. Russell and he had been asked to be pall bearers for her funeral by their Aunt Bella. She had moved in with Grandma Rose after the matriarch had started to suffer from Alzheimer’s in the few years before she died. Each subsequent visit for Dustin and family to B-lo for reunions took on a surreal form. An absence of recognition in the eyes of the old woman who used to smile at the sight of him and his siblings clouded that window to the soul. Tinges of sadness around a smile while children hugged her goodbye after those reunions concluded molted into quizzical lines of confusion about why such strangers were letting their offspring share such affections with her.

He thought about Grandma Rose’s memory loss. How vile a thing must it be to be unsure of the life you’ve lived, of whose life you might have been a part of. But his affection for her was a distant one. Something of a bond not quite formed. It must have been a reciprocal feeling between the two. His family had moved to Roc City from B-Lo well before he could recall any contiguous memories of his own life. He performed affectations for those relatives visited, as the frequency of such visits and their diminutive length left little allowance for deep formulations of familial bonds.

So it was as such when his Grandma Rose had slipped in the shower and broke a hip that Dustin felt only as bad for her as for anyone who might have been the subject of bad news delivered by a friend of a friend having met once or seen around his environs on occasion. A simple sadness, shallow and fleeting, more from the idea than the reality. Having been so old, his grandma had developed pneumonia in the hospital and slipped into a coma. He only noticed those days with any difference to the others in his life in the face and voice of his own mother. She would be on the phone with her sister on a regular basis, discussing the condition of their mother. She was getting worse with each day that passed. His mother began making frequent trips to B-Lo, spending the night there.

Dustin thought of how limited his father’s cooking skills were – macaroni and cheese with the occasional pan fried hotdog slices thrown in for flavor served each night during her absence. He thought of this more than he ever thought of how close to the edge of forever his grandma was.

In the final week, his mother asked if he and his brother wanted to say goodbye. Dustin did not really have an opinion, but seeing Russell’s eagerness, it infused in him the same desire. In her hospital room, Grandma Rose was hooked to a respirator, unconscious and oblivious to all that was happening. Her skin hung off her bones, having been forgetful of meals before the slip and now only being able to ingest food through intravenous tubes connected by needles in her forearms and the backs of her hands. She was covered in bruises from deteriorating circulation. Dustin watched her chest raise and lower with mechanical rhythm, unnatural and haunting. There was a rattle to each breath, as if something might escape, attempts to say some final words of utter import, something profound, but they were pressed beneath so much sleep and anesthetic they could not find their way out. Russell stood at the side of her bed, holding her hand. He said a small speech to her through a veil of tears and phlegmy sobs. Dustin stood closer to the door watching the happenings of the room. The nurses coming in to check her chart, change her IV bags. His mother turned to him, bleary eyed, and gestured for his company at her side. He obliged. Slits of sunlight fell on the old woman’s ailing body through the blinds. They stood their in silence for a long while, his mother combing her fingers through his hair.

Grandma Rose died a few weeks later. There was a wake, a funeral, and a celebration. At the funeral, Dustin, his brother, and a few uncles and cousins wore suits and were pall bearers. Dustin’s and Russell's were ill fitting, their growing bodies in between the stage of child and man. They didn’t quite fill the shoulders as well as their older relatives. Their hair was flat with too much gel, parted and straight save for the ends where the gel lost strength and it curled. They carried the casket from the parlor to the church where a mass was held. Eulogies were said. He looked around and saw all the women crying. A few men dabbed their eyes with the tips of their ties. He felt nothing any different than he had for all those years growing up. And then he looked at his mother. She was holding his father’s hand tight. He could tell how hard by the whiteness of his father’s knuckles, the redness of the fleshy part of his hand, the heel of the palm by the thumb. Her other hand clutched a bouquet of tissues, snot soaked and damp from tears pouring from the corners of her eyes. He watched her face wrench itself into the most pitiful expression he would ever see her wear as someone at the pulpit read something about Grandma Rose as a mother, about her memory loss, and about how much she was loved.

It was that expression that moved something deep within him. A door, a massive boulder at the edge of a reservoir of emotion and tears, a psychic pain he had known no equivalent to had pierced him to the core of his being, having seen the look on his mother’s face. He did not, could not understand it beyond the fact that he never liked to see his mother in pain.

Looking upon his own mother’s lifeless body in the funeral parlor at the wake, her face painted with mortician’s makeup, unnatural and unsettling, listening to Russell read his eulogy, he knew what she felt that day. A true moment of empathy, something rare for him, unable to understand people, he thought about how she would never see what might become of him, no longer there to congratulate or scorn, the same way all the memories of Grandma Rose’s life flaked away from her decaying mind. What are we to those we love but the collection of memories they have of us? How soon we find we disappear from their perspective of the world when their memories disappear from ours.