Red Earth Review #1

“Why would I?” They had no children.

“Potato salad,” he said, sliding Tupperware from his work bag. “Lauren made it—the best I’ve ever had. Want some?”

“I’m on a diet,” Cady said. Lauren couldn’t possibly eat potato salad. She lived on wheatgrass.

“Bullshit,” Fitz said and handed her a cold bottle of beer.

Cady spread the runny meringue over the filling, shoved the mess in the oven and imagined it’d be cooked and cooled and ready to eat by the time Fitz walked through the door.

In the bedroom she looked in the full length mirror. A fleece sweatshirt pooled and gathered around her middle, streaked with butter grease. She turned and looked at herself in profile. The sweatshirt made her look pregnant—she yanked it over her head and tossed it on the floor. The t-shirt underneath did the same; she discarded that too. Standing there in her dingy white bra, she saw that it wasn’t the clothes at all. She kicked the door shut and pulled her clothes back on.

She went for a close-up in the medicine cabinet mirror. She coated her lashes twice in black mascara, lined her lids in kohl, then blinked. Two dotted lines appeared below her eyebrows and at the top of her cheeks. She tied back her hair and bent into the sink basin, ran hot water and scrubbed the makeup off with a soapy washcloth. When she came up and looked again, she looked beaten, with two shiners.

Outside, the wind whipped up a blizzard against the bathroom pane. She pushed the shower curtain aside and looked out the window above the bathtub. Fitz couldn’t take a photo in this storm—he must’ve turned around by now. It’d been over an hour. She stepped inside the tub and pushed her nose to the glass, breathing in the condensation like a menthol cigarette. Out on the side street, a State Trooper with a toy-like grill on the front end did slow doughnuts under the street lamp. She smelled heat.

“Damn it,” she said, bounding up, nearly losing her footing on the floury porcelain. She raced to the kitchen and flung the oven door down. A thick roll of heat blasted her face. The white fluff on top had burned far beyond the desired cola-brown glaze.

The acrid scent of hot lemon tore up her nostrils. The crust was black. She turned sideways and gagged, then slammed the pie back where it came from. She flicked the oven dial off and went back to the bathroom window. The State Trooper was gone.

Lauren would be there tonight at the Banner Herald, working overtime because she always did. She did more than anybody, 7