13. Luna
LUNA
I’m four days late, and I’m a person who is never late, in any sense, for anything.
My body runs on the same schedule as the rest of my life, twenty-eight days, reliable as the radiator, trackable to the morning. I do track it, because tracking things is how I stay ahead of things. Because of this, I have known since Sunday, but have been in denial.
I’ve been declining to officially know, which is a skill I learned early and have kept sharp the way other people keep knives. You can hold a fact at arm’s length for a remarkable amount of time if your arms are strong, and mine have been in training since I was eight.
Monday morning, I feed Hairy and tell him about the weather, and I know exactly what I’m doing while I do it, and I do it anyway.
Ignore the problem, and it won’t swallow you whole.
He hangs at the front of the glass with his whole attention, the way he does every morning of our lives together, waiting for the briefing.
So, I give him a cold front and a forty percent chance of rain and nothing else, and he works his little mouth at me as I walk away, like he’s trying to tell me to tell him everything.
But I can’t. I can’t even tell me everything. How the hell am I supposed to tell a fish?
The wrongness of it follows me to the stockroom.
For four years, that fish has gotten every detail of my life.
The Hugo years, the lease panic, the night my mother’s recipe box turned up in a flea market and I had to sit down on a curb just to be able to breathe when I saw her handwriting again.
I still don’t know how it ended up there, but I knew it on sight.
The box was some vintage thing from Betty Crocker with the metal corners worn down from how she opened it. Inside was her buttermilk biscuit recipe and dozens of others, but it’s the biscuits that I missed the most. I made a batch that night and ate them while crying, which is a feat.
I’ve started keeping secrets from my goldfish. That can’t be healthy.
I reorganize the back stockroom instead of addressing the issue. All of it, every shelf, a project I have been saving for a slow February, executed on a Monday at a velocity that would concern an organizer.
Wicks by gauge, then by supplier, then by gauge within supplier.
Jars rotated, counted, and recounted when the count comes out fine the first time.
Oils and dyes and perfumes, all categorized and labels-out and in order by bottle height, flavor theme, and my mood.
Which is to say, I’ll probably need to reorganize it all again soon.
There’s a rhythm you can get into where the hands run the whole operation, and the brain is permitted to sit in the back seat with the radio off, and I ride that rhythm for three hours, and it works. Kinda.
Cherry appears in the doorway at eleven with a clipboard she isn’t using.
She doesn’t say anything at first. She watches me alphabetize essential oils that have been in scent-family order for four years, and she leans against the frame.
Cherry’s silences have a wattage that most people’s speeches don’t, but even she eventually gives up pointed silence for words.
“Luna.”
“I’m fine.”
Fine is how I do everything. In the house I grew up in, feelings on display were never once useful. They were inventory you’d left out where it could be damaged, and I learned to warehouse mine early and thoroughly, and the warehouse has excellent security and no visiting hours.
‘I’m fine’ is not a lie. It’s a policy.
Cherry looks at me for one more long moment, reads whatever is printed on me in the font only she can see, and does the most Cherry thing in her entire repertoire. She nods once, goes back out front, and leaves the door open behind her.
I thought I’d be able to breathe with her gone, but I think she took the oxygen with her. I can’t think much at the moment, and now, everything is organized. I need something else to do.
At lunch, I walk to the pharmacy on the corner. I buy gum, hand cream, a birthday card for no one, and a pregnancy test, in that order, arranged on the belt for an audience of a nineteen-year-old cashier who could not possibly care less.
The test goes in my bag, wrapped in the receipt. The card says THINKING OF YOU on the front, which is one way to put it. The gum is spearmint. I will never buy spearmint again without standing in this exact minute.
The shop’s back bathroom is small with an exposed pipe, a mirror with a corner chip, and the good hand soap because some standards survive everything.
I do what the box says. Set a three-minute timer on my phone, put the phone face down on the sink, then spend the three minutes reading the grout, which needs attention.
I add it to the list because it’s the only way I’ll survive any of this.
The timer sounds, tinny and enormous.
Two lines, pink.
I look for a long time. Long past confirmation, past double-checking the box diagram, past any data-gathering justification at all. My eyes bounce between the test and the diagram dozens of times. But they don’t need to.
Two means pregnant. Not that I didn’t know that already.
I don’t have words yet. Just a vast rearrangement, and at the bottom of it, very small and very stubborn. Then I wash my hands, fix one piece of hair, wash my mouth out because I keep tasting sick, and go back out front because it is one forty on a Monday and the shop is mine.
Invader on board or not, I have rent to pay.
A woman comes in at two wanting a candle for her sister’s birthday, the difficult, hippy sister, she clarifies, the one who returns things.
Not on my watch. I walk her through the wall the way I have a thousand times. Patchouli or amber, that’s the real decision, and we test both on her wrists. I tell her what I always tell people, that patchouli forgives and amber commits, because it lingers far longer after you blow out the candle.
She laughs and takes the amber, and I ring her up with steady hands and a working smile. She wishes me a good one on her way out. The bell does its small bright clang. I restock the amber, one jar forward, faces aligned.
She has no idea I was dying inside that whole time. That I was on the verge of a meltdown. That’s the thing about any customer-facing job. It turns you into a liar, whether you want it to or not.
People expect a smile or, at the very least, friendliness. They don’t expect your life story, or the problems you’re facing, or the fact that the man who got you pregnant may have killed people in the process of conducting his business.
Funny. That part of things never really sank in until I thought about having his child.
I say nothing all afternoon. Not because I’m hiding. Because I don’t know which words yet, and words you say before you know them belong to other people forever.
I cannot fuck this up any more than I already have.
Mike, restocking the make-your-own tables at four, stops on his way past and puts the good tape gun on my counter, the one we fight over, the one with the smooth action.
“You seem quiet,” he says, with the simple diagnostic confidence of a man who notices exactly one thing per day and today chose me. “You can have the good one today.”
It means more to me than he can possibly know. “Thanks, Mike.”
“Anytime.” And he’s gone again, back into his boxes, kindness deployed and forgotten in the same motion.
I hold the tape gun and have to blink at the register for a second, because some people just hand you things, no invoice attached, and I work with two of them.
At seven, we flip the sign. Mike bikes off into the dusk with his helmet light blinking. Cherry pretends to leave and doesn’t and finds me in the stockroom among my over-organized shelves, standing in front of the wicks-by-gauge with my bag in my hand and no plan in my head.
No thoughts, either.
I don’t say anything. I just open the bag and take out the receipt-wrapped shape and hold it where she can see. I watch her read it all. The test, the day, the stockroom, all of it, in about one second flat.
“Okay.”
She gives my hand a squeeze, then sits down on the stockroom floor. A woman in a vintage wiggle dress and good stockings, down onto the cold concrete against the shelf of jars, and pats the floor beside her.
I fold down into the spot, strings cut, and our shoulders touch, and that’s all.
“You can talk,” she says. “You can cry. You can lose your whole mind in any direction you want. I’m here for the duration, baby. There’s no wrong way to do it.”
And then she says nothing.
Ten minutes, maybe more, the stockroom ticking around us, we sit. The street sounds arrive small and far away. She doesn’t fill it, doesn’t pat my knee, doesn’t tell me it’ll be okay or ask what I’m going to do or wonder out loud about Ivan, doesn’t spend one syllable on her own feelings about it.
She just sits with me.
Nobody has done that for me since my mother died. People talk. People fix. People need you to perform your crisis in a shape they can respond to, and the performance costs more than the crisis.
Not Cherry. This might be the only time she doesn’t perform for her audience.
Somewhere in minute seven, my eyes spill over, quietly, without drama, and she hands me the handkerchief from her handbag without looking and keeps her eyes courteously on the wick shelf. “Your gauges are out of order,” she says at last, gently, which is a lie.
They are in perfect order, they are in the best order of their lives, and the laugh that comes out of me is wet and ridiculous.
“Liar.”
“Sometimes lies are the best truths. Might not be your gauges, but something’s out of order, ain’t it?”
I tip my head onto her shoulder for a moment. “You ever…” I sigh. “Have you ever had a pregnancy scare, Cherry?”
“I could kiss you.”
I blink up at her. “Huh?”
“My dear, the good Lord did not bless me with the equipment for such a thing.”
More blinking, until I laugh awkwardly and slap my hand over my mouth. “Oh my god! I’m so sorry! I?—”
“Think nothing of it. You’re not in your right mind.”
“Yeah, okay. I can’t believe I asked you that.”
She beams down at me. “Honestly, back in the day when I was still sorting things out, in my twenties, I dabbled in women, not just dressing like one. Had a pregnancy scare that turned out to be the result of sleeping with an insomniac whose cycle was all wonky because of her condition.”
“I cannot picture you with a woman that way.”
She shrugs. “Me either, that’s why it didn’t stick. Point is, these things happen. What you do with it is up to you. Ready to face the world?”
I take a breath to stall, then get up. She brushes off her dress and walks me out through the dark shop, past the tank where Hairy hangs at the glass, watching, unbriefed and patient.
“Tomorrow,” I tell him. “Full report tomorrow. I promise.”
Cherry locks the door behind us and walks me to the corner, and at the corner she takes my face in both hands, looks at me under the streetlight, and says, “Whatever you decide, I’m here for you. I’ll hold your hand through all of it, whatever it is. That’s the whole speech.”
“And I love you for it, Cherry.”
Then she winks and sails off toward her train, and I walk home through the cold. At my kitchen table, I make the chamomile and sit with the phone in front of me, Ivan’s name three taps away, and I turn the phone face down next to the mug.
Not tonight.
Tomorrow, there will be words, for the fish first, then, when I find the right ones, for the man who answers texts in complete sentences. Tonight, I sit with my tea in my small kitchen, breathing.