Tomatoes KENNETH B. SIMPSON: A man shouldn’t have to wait this long to eat. It’s boiled chicken again. Steam from the pot spreads throughout the kitchen, suffocating. The radio is on, the volume low, murmurs of some song with guitars and a crowing voice, singing about love. I can barely hear it. We used to listen to the radio together, but not anymore. We used to listen out on the back porch, listening as the stars and the moon listened, listening as the sea of swaying wheat listened, but not anymore. Her graying hair is pulled back in a bun, tight, taut, she hovers over the counter, the one right next to the humming white fridge with a calendar of national parks on it except the calendar is turned to August and it’s the middle of September already and she’s cutting apart the tomatoes she bought from town, the ones I said we didn’t need, we have enough food in this house, she said I just wanted some goddamn tomatoes, don’t you want some goddamn tomatoes too, Kenneth? and I stood up and pushed my chair back and it scraped against the dulled tan tile floor and the screech of the wooden chair against the dulled tile pierced the kitchen and I stomped out the door to the fields because the fields don’t ask for nothing, you water them and they feed you, but Ann, Ann needs too much, takes too much, doesn’t give enough in return. That was this morning. Now it’s dinner, my boots are off, my brown boots wait by the wooden door on the red carpet that she cleans every day but not well enough because it’s always dirty. The steam still suffocates. She still cuts up the tomatoes. The radio still plays, murmurs of some song, but still there. We used to listen to the radio together. Not anymore, but we used to. We used to. We used to listen together out on the back porch, the wooden porch I built myself out of wood I bought from Len in town when he asked me if I wanted to buy some wood and I said how much and he said a hundred bucks and I said no I’ll give you $75 and he said come on Kenneth you know I need the money, you know my brother’s sick and I’m the only one working the damn fields and I said I’ll give you $75 and I gave him the money and he helped me load the planks of wood into the back of my Ford and I took the wood home and built the porch in a week. I worked at night because I had to work the fields during the day and she would creep open the backdoor at night in her light blue nightgown and say Can you stop the hammering and get on into bed you need the sleep anyways and I would
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