Page 9 of Stay Buried

I kissed Pearl hard as I unbuttoned her dress, ending the discussion.

There was no more talk of husbands and wives or running away. No discussion of why we couldn’t just go on being girl and girl hidden away from the world in our secret house. There was only our lips, my tongue exploring the topography of my lover’s body, like a cartographer charting new land. Here a freckle, there a little hair where it shouldn’t be, a dimple no one else but Pearl’s mother had ever seen.

Pearl’s body went rigid and she pushed me off, sat up, stared wide-eyed at the window with its pulled-back curtain.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing…” Pearl said, pulling her dress closed. “I thought I saw…”

“What?” I asked, heart hammering. Had someone been there at the window? Had someone seen us?

“A horse,” Pearl said, shaking her head. “I thought I saw the head of a horse looking in at us. But that’s impossible, isn’t it?”

Every hair on my body stood up as a chill washed over me. I turned, looked back at the window. But there were only the bare trees outside, and our own reflection: two girls in each other’s arms on a dirty floor in a falling-down house.

“You’re right,” I said. “Impossible.”

FOURASHLEY

September 23, 2016

The stains would never come out of the old wide-plank kitchen floor. Ashley understood that. She’d understood it even as she spent much of her afternoon scrubbing at the pine floorboards with just about every cleaning product in the house.

“You’re the only one who’s gonna notice,” Malcolm said, passing her the joint he’d just lit up.

It was nearly nine. Gram had headed upstairs to bed shortly after dinner, saying she was tired—the canning project had done her in.

She’d been strangely quiet during dinner. On edge, upset about breaking the jar. “Bumbling old fool,” she’d called herself. “Maybe you shouldn’t allow me in the kitchen.”

“It’syourkitchen, Gram,” Ash had told her. “If you leave the cooking to me, we’ll all suffer. And Malcolm will definitely stop coming for supper on Fridays.”

Malcolm came each Friday, and called days before to ask what was on the menu, to put in requests and sweet-talk Gram into making his favorites: chicken and dumplings, lasagna, pot roast, berry pie orchocolate cake for dessert. The Friday dinners were a highlight of all of their weeks.

After dinner, they’d all settled in the living room to watch TV, just like usual. Gram loved the cooking shows: especially the silly contests where chefs were handed a basket of strange ingredients and given an hour to come up with something great. Ash and Gram were on the couch, Malcolm was in the big recliner.

But Gram was pretty much silent until announcing she was going to turn in early.

“Don’t you want to see how the sauerkraut cupcakes turn out?” Malcolm had asked.

“Not tonight, dear,” Gram said, already on her way out of the room.

“Shit,” Ashley hissed when Gram was out of earshot. She’d gone too far showing Gram the letter, telling her she wanted to go to Boone’s Ferry. She’d handled it all wrong.

“I’d totally try a sauerkraut cupcake,” Mal said, glassy eyes fixed on the TV. Then he pulled out his phone and did a voice-to-text note: “Business idea: a cupcake bakery where each cupcake has a surprise ingredient. Sauerkraut, beets, ghost peppers.”

After a bit of wheedling, Ashley had convinced Malcolm to leave the cooking show and head back into the kitchen to help clear the table, do the dishes, and put away the leftovers. Now they sat at the table, drinking beer and sharing the rest of the joint Mal had brought.

Rather than relaxed, though, Malcolm seemed anxious, which Ashley recognized as hisI’ve got a new no-fail business ideakind of energy. This, like their back-and-forth debates over the dinner menu, was expected from Mal.

Malcolm was always searching for the next big idea. It was an endless cycle: he’d come up with a plan, put all his time, energy, and money into it, and then before it ever got off the ground, he’d lose interest and jump to something new. He was like Mom in so many ways.

Back in May, he’d decided to start a butterfly farm: ordered cages, tented nets, plants, nectar, and caterpillars. The caterpillars turned to butterflies before he had food and plants ready for them, so he opened up the tent and let them all go. He’d gone into business with his friend Seth, building wooden yurt kits for people, but only sold one. Last year he’d started a silk-screened T-shirt business, but didn’t realize you needed to do the lettering backward. He was wearing one of his failed T-shirts today, one that he had designed for a local band, Red Dog Daze, with the band name spelled backward at the bottom under a red dog. After that, he got involved in what Ashley was sure was a pyramid scheme, selling an athletic supplement called GoBroGo Greens. Between his entrepreneurial endeavors, he worked odd jobs house painting, landscaping, and picking up a few shifts at the local food co-op.

“Ash, I’ve got a new idea to run by you.”

“Yeah?” Ashley’s thoughts were drifting, circling back to Gram in the kitchen, to the letter, to Boone’s Ferry. Would she really go? Make the trip against Gram’s wishes?

“So I’ve been reading this book,The Reason You Haven’t Succeeded,” Mal went on, “and doing all the exercises, and I think I’ve been approaching things all wrong. I haven’t been working in my ‘zone of greatness.’?”