Seed

by Katherine Standefer
Colorado College

Honorable Mention story in the 2005 Nick Adams Short Story Contest

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Note: This story is reprinted with permission. Copying this story without the express, written permission of the author is prohibited.

I never thought I would be around to see Jeremy Restridge and Jenna Silver break up. They'd been together forever, practically, since sophomore year of high school when he walked in on her in the men's bathroom during a school dance putting salami around the rim of every toilet. It was a perfect match. They chain-smoked cigarettes at the drive-in and threw eggs at tourists from under the bridge. He had long hair and she had big boobs.

I was afraid of them. In high school I was quiet and small-breasted, wearing sweaters and sitting at the Anti-Drug Coalition table in the cafeteria selling fundraising tickets. When I graduated I pledged never to come back to Wisconsin. I took classes in Boston and spent school holidays at my Dad's apartment in New York. I tried out Northeastern dialects. Rest and Jenna became vague history, something inevitable occurring in a place I no longer cared about, like franchising, or deforestation.

And then my roommate Alyssa had her terrible idea to make time capsules. "We can leave them at my mom's house," she said, "and come back in ten years and see how we're doing!" She spent the last weekend before graduation paper-macheing an old paper towel tube. I thought this was stupid.

"C'mon, Mariel," she pulled on my arm, "you're no fun." She put up sticky-notes above the light switch in the bathroom, on the refrigerator handle, on my pillow: "Mariel is no fun."

Somehow this convinced me that it was a good idea to "be fun." I wrote down the internships I was expecting in New York, an apartment in Little Italy, rainy Sundays in the Metro staring at Munch. I laid out something like plans and even started to look forward to them. It was inevitable, then, that my mother would go crazy three days before graduation.

My father called me. "You have to go home," he said. "I bought you a plane ticket. Hannah Winfield called me. Your mother's not doing well and she's sure as hell not my responsibility. Hannah says there are ants all over the house."

"Normal people have ants," I told him.

"Mare," he said, "you're getting on that plane."

I got on the plane. The stewardess spilled tomato juice in my lap.

When I got home the peonnies were in bloom behind the house. I left my suitcases on the porch and walked around back where my mother was standing hunched over the wire baskets. Her hair was a single golden braid down her back, though with more grey than I remembered.

She turned at the sound of my footsteps in the grass and watched me approach. I stopped. She was standing in the soil with bare feet and a floppy straw hat.

"You need the wire baskets," she said finally, "because the heads of the flowers can get so big they droop. They'll hit the ground or break themselves in half." She grabbed the neck of a fuschia peonnie and sliced it neatly, offering me the head. I pressed it to my face.

"It's a thick smell, isn't it." Mother folded her hands, a smile playing at her lips.

"It's good to see you," I said.

I spent that summer working at the Lake Vue Inn. It was a desk job, mostly, checking out those tiny circular cabin keys to families and honeymooners, but by the end of May the cleaning woman went on unexpected maternity leave and it became my job to change the linens and sweep out the cabins twice a week. It wasn't a bad job, as they go. "You're an absolute gem, perfect timing," Mrs. Winfield said, pulling at her sweater. She showed me the keys, the log book, the credit card swipe. "My regular desk boy gets home in a few days, out of state funeral, you know, bless his heart."

He sauntered in on a Tuesday, when the fans were working on overtime and I'd just resorted to one of Mrs. Winfield's trashy romance novels. I heard the sharp slam of the screen door and immediately went pink, shoving the novel under the desk.

"Hello, would you like a room?" I tried to be pleasant, folding my shaky hands in my lap.

He smiled. "I work here," he said, and slid himself nonchalantly over the counter. "Don't I know you from somewhere?"

It wasn't until that moment that I realized it was Rest. He didn't look like I remembered. His hair was shorter, the ponytail gone, a tall, slender boy with soft cheeks. I held out a hand to be professional. "Mariel Cole." His eyes widened.

"No shit," he said. He looked at my hand thoughtfully. "Where ya been all these years?" In one smooth gesture, he shook my hand firmly and then bent to brush his lips along the top of it.

"It's Jeremy," he said. "I know." I busied myself hiding the novel under a stack of brochures. He grinned wryly.

"You do, huh," he said. "That could mean several things." He watched me with his hands on his hips.

"You here for good?"

"I'm here as long as it takes. Summer, maybe. I have to watch out for my mother." I opened the lap drawer, began to flip all the pens in the right direction.

"Well," he said. "Well." He shook a shock of blondish hair from his eyes. "Looks like we'll be seeing a bit of each other this summer. I'll try not to mess up your pens." He sat in the chair next to me and took out a book of his own; I stared at the edge of Mrs. Winfield's novel. So awful, so alluring. The clock was ticking in the back room. I crossed my legs and leaned back in my chair, watching him read. He chewed his lip a little as he turned the page. I exhaled.

Rest looked up from his book. He looked startled, like he expected me to say something.

"So," I said, "thrown any eggs lately?"

Rest closed his book. He looked at me steadily, then smiled. "Is that what you remember, huh," he said, and crossed his legs, poking at his sneaker.

I could feel the heat radiating off my cheekbones. "Well," I said, "I mean, you and Jenna?" It wasn't a question really. I don't know what I expected him to say. He was grinning up at me, his elbow on his knee, his head propped up in his hand.

"Jenna," he said, and looked at the ceiling. "Jenna. Well, we're not together anymore, if that helps," he told me, amused.

"Oh," I said, "you're not?" I felt like a third grader.

"No," he said. After a moment he scratched his eyebrow, adding, "Recently." Then he looked hard at the desk, leaned forward, and pulled out Winfield's novel. There were silvery flowers and a half-naked man on the cover.

"This yours?" he said.

It wasn't as hard as I expected to fall into routine with Rest. Without Jenna he was easy, relaxed. He'd quit smoking. He had no interest in throwing eggs. June was slow and we spent our afternoons playing War on the front desk and talking, which had never been the focal point of any relationship of mine before.

"Is she leaving you alone yet?" I asked.

"No, but sooner or later she'll get the picture. She might leave town. I could see her leaving town." He laid an ace on the counter, grinned at me. "She was pretty much my world, and I think I'm still hers. Basically."

I drew a three, sucking in my breath. "Why, then?"

"Why does a person start smoking?"

"What?"

He cocked an eyebrow at me, then looked down.

"She told me I was fat," he said. I guffawed. He turned his head, incredulous.

"What?" I said. "You're a guy. Guys don't care about that sort of stuff. My ex used to order three pizzas at a time, no shame. The metabolism takes it on, not the hips."

He looked at me for a moment.

"Your mom takes it on," he said.

His fingers were clenched around the cards. Was he serious? "Rest?" I said, and then the smile began to play at the corner of his lips, and we both burst out laughing. With a grin Rest slashed the cards off the desk with his forearm and promptly fell back in his chair. He hit the floor with a wooden thunk, gasping for breath as the cards rained down, some of them caught up in the overhead fan and the queens, sullen and scattered, flipping down onto the carpet in the entryway.

I reached out a hand to help him up. "May I have the pleasure," he said, and grabbed my fingers in his own and jerked hard so that I landed on his stomach, where the shirt was a little sweaty.

My mother was obsessed with the peonnies. She sent me into work with thick handfuls in plastic maple syrup bottles. "Oh my," said Mrs. Winfield, "those are lovely." Rest and I propped the bottles up at the front desk and watched the lines of ants spreading out into the room.

"It's awful in my house," I said.

"Your mom? What's so awful?" He rested his head against the wall, tipped dangerously back in his chair.

"No, the ants. The ants are awful. We have flowers everywhere, and they get into the Cheerios. I poured myself a bowl of ants the other day."

"No kiddin'," he laughed. "So your mom's okay."

"Well," I said. "I wouldn't say that."

"I would like to meet her," he said. "She sounds like a nice lady."

That's how Rest ended up at my house for dinner on a Friday night. We walked home from work under the near-solstice sun. At the door I stopped, turned him toward me.

"My mother's crazy, okay?" I squinted up at him, picked a ball of lint off his flannel.

"Okay," he smiled. He looked out towards the lake. "I've got a secret," he said, and bent down, his breath tickling my ear. "Me too."

Inside the kitchen my mother was bustling over a basket of rolls.

"There are only three of us," I said, laughing at the mound.

"You know the ants are necessary, don't you?" She stopped, stared hard at Rest. "The buds can't open without the ants."

"Yes, Mother, we know that. Rest, would you like an iced tea?" I led him to the table. "Sit down."

"No, thank you," he said, "just water."

"They're perennials," my mother said.

Continue the story

Note: This story is reprinted with permission. Copying this story without the express, written permission of the author is prohibited.

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