Dead Flowers | H.S.

Chapter Fifteen

My heart was thumping hard as I approach Howard's front door-still deep red and cracked from age. He told me once, the first time I visited and drank three glasses of lemonade, that him and his wife had painted the door after they got married.

"She'd told me that she wanted to paint something, but liked the colors of our walls. I'd been a smartass, then. Paint the damn door, then! So she did. She painted the damn door!" He laughed, then. His face folded because he had laughed his entire life. He had smiled so much that the sides of his mouth were creased.

I didn't even have to knock. Howard opened the door with kind eyes, open arms. What a strange comfort he brought to me, weighing me to his croaky front porch like an anchor dragging across the bottom of the ocean.

"It's about that time, huh? I've got lemonade set up on the porch."

Howard and I sat for hours, or maybe minutes. Harry and I had made love that entire morning-when we made love I never knew how much time and come and gone. It was as if I were floating, weightless, through time and days. He spoke of his wife and closed his eyes when the breeze tickled his nose.

I smiled at him, stayed tight lipped. I wanted to tell him that I loved the boy he hired, that I was a new woman. Yet I did not. When he was finished speaking, he nodded to me, the way people do when they want you to talk about yourself.

"Nothing new to report."

"Nothing at all?"

"Same boy sniffing around where he doesn't belong."

Howard studied me long and hard. I wondered if maybe he could see the swollen mess of my lips and the plumpness in my breasts. Had Harry left tracks from each place his hands touched? Was there a map upon my skin where he had felt out his destination in the light of a blue morning?

"You better be playing piano," he finally said, "God didn't give you those fingers for idling."

I let a smile paint my lips and turned my face to the oak tree in his back yard. My legs were wet with sweat-it was nearly eighty degrees outside.

"God gave me these fingers to feel things," I reached for him, "like your hands."

- -

It was not surprising to see the familiar truck in the driveway and to see the absence of him on the front porch. Of course my family had invited him inside and of course they were waiting for me to return.

My skin, red from the ride home beneath the glowing sky, tingled when I saw my parents seated at the dining table. My mother laughed at something Ryder said and my father smiled under his mustache.

I watched for a long time or maybe not that long of a time. I leaned against the thick air around me and patted my jeans down onto my legs. My mother and father smiled and laughed in a perpetual rhythm that they always followed whenever a guest was visiting.

Every once in a while Ryder's nearly-bald head would bob and each time it did, I was sickened. I wanted to yell or maybe cry. I wanted to spit. I wanted to squeeze myself, shed my skin. Cut my stomach open over the table, spill my guts, watch my family relish in the feast of their daughter. It still wouldn't be enough for them.