A New Soul

(This story was written in September of 2008.)

I don’t know why I got fired, but I did. I worked at a hospital, at the check-in desk. I’m not sure what I did wrong but they told me to leave. So in the middle of the day, I walked home. I hadn’t been outside in the midday sun for so long. It was springtime but warm like the summer. I sweated through my clothes and walked through the hearty heat wondering why I’d been let go. I supposed the fact that I didn’t know was part of the problem. The other staff was always correcting mistakes I hadn’t known I made. The same problems would happen over again. I guess I didn’t consider them mistakes.

I arrived at my house. Small and dark, it’s just big enough for my daughter, Sri, and I. The curtains were closed and the air felt damp like mold. Sri wasn’t here much. I slid down onto the couch, lay, and nuzzled my cheek against the rough fabric. My mind resonated one thought: I’m heartbroken.

Then I heard a noise. Somebody was home. Sri’s truck wasn’t in the driveway; it was a school day. I pulled myself up and wandered towards the shuffling. There was a man, old enough to have gray stringy hair, arranging at least a dozen dried roses in a vase on Sri’s bed stand. I watched until he noticed me and jerked around. He had wrinkles cascading over his thick face. He was wearing frayed jean shorts. He recovered from the start and smiled.

“You must be Sri’s mother,” he said, his voice warm.

“Who are you, my estranged father?” I hulked, trying one of my famous jokes. He thought I was serious. He looked concerned.

“I’m Sri’s lover.”

He said it with eyes thin and concentrated like someone delivering cancerous news. The frankness of the line hit me and I felt waves of fury lurking in my stomach. I could choose not to believe it, but Sri was an openly sexual girl. I’d seen her kissing men who looked to be in their late 20s in the driveway at night. I wanted her to keep coming home to sleep, so I said nothing.

“She’s 16,” I said, “That’s illegal,” I said and he nodded again. “I’m calling the cops.”

“Oh, no…” he groaned. His face had concern splashed across it. “I’ve never hurt her, Maize.” He knew my name which meant Sri had talked about me. My ears burned.

As soon as Sri developed breasts and realized people liked her for it, she’d been straying as far as she could from me. I loved the beautiful young woman she was becoming and began shopping fanatically for brassieres and panties. She appeared to me as the most stunning creature. She was a smart child, a funny child, a kind child. I am aware of the bias I had for her, as she never enchanted other children as she had me. Money from her father, who left when he inherited a lemon grove in Italy, sustained us. I didn’t have to leave her to go to work. Sri and I were best friends.

I lost her fairly easily. She just slipped away without a word. One night, deep into her preteen absence, I heard her coming home and inched out so as not to scare her away. She was gulping water with the throaty noises of a thirsty dog, and I sauntered into the kitchen.

“Sri.” She stopped and put the glass down. The water shined on her upper lip from the moonlight outside. “I miss having you around,” I said. I wanted to woo her, excite her, entrance her but instead I just spoke.

“Mom,” she said. I thought at first that she was mocking my tone. She took a small step towards me and blinked slowly. “I’m…just afraid that…one day the earth…is just going to…tumble out of its orbit,” she explained finally. That’s when I realized she was high. “Like a baby dropping its rattle.” I stared at her until she walked past me to her bedroom and I sank to the kitchen floor, alone and weak.

“Did you take those roses from my garden?” I growled, shaking now. The man indicated no, of course not. I dashed outside to my flowers and flew at the roses, sorting through them, looking for headless stems. Finding none, I turned around, breathless. My skin felt like ash and dust. I turned around to see the man in the doorway, holding out a glass.

“It’s lemonade. I brought it for Sri, but you look like you could use some.”

“No thank you,” I said, beginning to walk past him into the house. Air had begun moving outside. The fragrance of the flowers blew around my face, inside my nostrils. I devoured it.

“Here,” he said and grabbed my hand, leading me to a bench. I accepted his direction and then the lemonade. I was thirsty, but took only a sip. He watched me like an eager child.

“It’s good. Sweet,” I said. He grinned.

“The magical part is I don’t add any sugar.”

I looked around at my flowers. I’d begun gardening a few years ago. There was just a massive field of dirt in our backyard originally. I didn’t have a natural green thumb, but I did alright. The flowers sprouted like walls. They bloomed and blossomed under my watch, during different seasons and times of day. Sri plucked some to tuck in her hair from time to time. I hated seeing the empty stem, the sturdy green stick that ended in nothing.

I fell down on my knees and began picking weeds. After a couple minutes, the man walked off. Gladdened, I started working harder.


Some hours later, the sun was setting and I saw Sri pull up in her turquoise truck. The man was in the passenger seat. I looked away, blushing. Sri was hardly ever home when I was awake. A couple minutes later, the two of them walked through the backdoor and towards me. Like a teenager being confronted I stared at the bushes, my hands working frantically. They stood behind me.

“Maize,” the man said, urging me to turn around. I didn’t.

“Mom,” Sri’s voice was so gentle. It had ripened since I last heard her speak. It poured over me. I got to my feet and then turned around.

First, the man held out a pitcher of that lemonade. “You seemed to like it. I brought you some more.” He sat the container on the bench behind him when I didn’t react.

“And…” he began, nudging Sri.

“And we made you this,” she said. She held out a package wrapped in brown paper.

I unwrapped it delicately. The man seemed to be almost jumping out of his skin while Sri stayed still. Inside was a quilt. I held the top corners and it unfolded, falling to the ground in a terrific tumble. Each square was a different color.

“We sewed it together,” the man said. I looked at Sri. Her cheeks were ripe, like a peach and I wanted so badly to hug her. My body trembled.

“Mom, you look tired. Do you need to go to sleep?” Sri asked. She spoke so slowly, so differently from the playful chipmunk voice of her childhood.

I may have nodded, I’m not sure, but my feet gave out and I fell into the dirt with the quilt in my hands. I raised it up to my face and breathed. It smelled like her. I felt Sri on one side of me. It was paining her, I know, but she placed her arm around my neck and tugged me towards her. She pressed her forehead into my ear. I pulled my face away from the quilt, letting it drape over my legs. Then I noticed that the sun, which was falling behind the horizon, was directly behind that pitcher of lemonade. It shone and glowed so that the whole garden seemed like it was embroidered with gold, held forever in that moment by lemons that were too sweet.