Defensible spaces, p.7
Defensible Spaces, page 7
Sometimes when Lonna stays over, she wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t remember where she is, stumbling around looking for something familiar until Ashlynn wakes up from the noise and helps her back to bed.
Ashlynn turns on the kitchen light. An empty whiskey bottle is in the sink, her husband, Brady’s, attempt to clean up after himself. Lonna and Brady have equal but opposite drinking problems: Brady gets excited and loud and Lonna gets confused and stubborn, both of them unmanageable. Last night Brady got on another rant about the hippies protesting clear-cutting while Lonna played Uno with Mellie, Ashlynn and Brady’s four-year-old, neither of them following the rules of the game. Ashlynn went upstairs with more than half a frozen pizza on her plate, the climb feeling longer than it had the day before, the world getting less explorable with every hour that the twins live in her belly. She put on A Christmas Story, which she had to turn up loud because Brady continued ranting to Lonna and their bedroom is a loft.
She uncovers the ham on the counter, a pink plastic hunk the size of a baby. She preheats the oven to 350 and sits on the floor to dig around for the roasting pan in the lower drawer. The pots and pans are loud with their shifting and she hears a moan from what they call the guest bedroom: her mom fell asleep with the door wide open. Ashlynn can see her on the pullout sofa on top of the covers in the bathrobe. Before the bathrobe, she used to pass out in the same way, naked, and once in high school it happened when Ashlynn had friends over.
She closes the door and carefully gets on a chair to look for the pan above the fridge. She checks inside the oven because sometimes that happens. The oven has a meaty smell from the frozen pizzas she made last night. Her mom had slurred something about how one pizza should be enough for the four of them, but Ashlynn eats more than Brady does, especially now, so they made two. When Ashlynn is not pregnant, her mom makes sure Ashlynn knows that she is supposed to be worried about being large; she is supposed to say no to bread or drink only smoothies or get on a treadmill. Her mom used to tell her that being overweight was connected to infertility, but now that Ashlynn will have more children than her mother did, her mom will have to find another consequence.
She remembers: the roasting pan is in the back of her car. It has been there since Thanksgiving when she lent it to her friend Karly, who wanted to host a Friendsgiving in Danny Mansion’s new apartment. Ashlynn can’t remember if she went to the meal or not: did Mellie come? Brady? Ashlynn’s pregnancy with Mellie had been hard on her mind, but twins seem to need twice as much of her memory.
Leaving the light on in the kitchen to find her way through the living room, she knocks a branch of their Christmas tree and an ornament thuds on the carpet. Their tree is always too big for their living room, but Vander, Ashlynn’s uncle and Brady’s boss, gives his employees a tree each year and no one has a say in what they get. There is also a mountain of presents under the tree that Ashlynn had nothing to do with, which must have come in the bags her mom brought last night, toys and more toys for Mellie even though Ashlynn tells her that toys are not what they need.
She steps into Sorels and Brady’s work coat and puts the hood up. The cold snap started last night and it’s snowing. Small flakes fall through the porch light until she turns it off to see the sky, somehow clear despite the snow. They rented this place for several years, starting right after their landlord’s property came up for the Defensible Spaces Campaign and Brady was on the crew clearing debris for a one-hundred-foot radius from the house. Brady and the landlord got along, and soon they were renting to own, and now it is theirs. The skirt of cleared land in every direction makes Ashlynn feel not protected from fire but exposed to people driving by.
She walks by Brady’s truck with the thinnest skin of snow fallen over it and opens the trunk to her car. The pan is wedged between bags of sand she keeps with her for when she gets stuck in the snow. She puts the pan on the roof and gets in the passenger seat because she can barely fit behind the wheel anymore. She sits with the door open.
She loves being awake when everyone else sleeps, a feeling she found when she started delivering for the Clayton Clamour on Thursday mornings. She is the first woman to drive a Clamour newspaper route, and while this is one tiny dot in a world of important things, sometimes she feels good about it. No one thought a woman could drive through the snowstorms or get her car out from being stuck on a far-off dirt road that snowplows sometimes miss. She knows what she’s doing and after three years of having the route, other people know she does, too. She loves hurling out rolls of news, loves cards left in boxes over the holidays. She loves how it makes her part of something that isn’t Troy’s Trees. She loves letting Mellie sleep in the car seat in the back while she slowly reads the entire paper front page to back, spreading it to its largest on her passenger seat.
It takes her a long time to read the paper; she’s not school smart like Elizabeth Hadford or Laurie Edmunds or any of the other kids who left Clayton for out of state colleges. She finished high school but barely, getting held back and failing almost everything just like Danny Mansion. She and Danny have a lot in common: despite their bad grades, they both wrote down every word the teachers said and every thought that came to them when getting through a book or a newspaper or a magazine. On the bookshelf in Ashlynn and Brady’s bedroom are dozens of spiral notebooks, hers and Danny’s since he didn’t have a steady place for so long. She should bring them to his apartment in Clayton. She should bring them before her car has three car seats in it and it takes an hour to load everything up anytime she wants to go into town. She has tested out three car seats and the stacks of rolled up newspapers, and it will work if both twins are good in the car like Mellie is.
Maybe she should pick up her dad earlier than they’d planned, to beat the snow. Her parents live ten minutes away on dirt roads without signs: right, left, right, right. Sometimes on a down slump, Brady rants about all the driving they do for her parents, so Ashlynn doesn’t bother asking him to help anymore. Though he has no problem driving twice as far into Clayton, then across town to the Troy ranch if Vander calls and needs a pair of gloves left in Brady’s truck.
Even with being up so early, with having to drive over to pick up her dad in a few hours, with Brady’s parents coming, with the needs of three children, two of them unseen, Ashlynn feels the same lightness she felt after calling Aunt Jolene to say they’d try Christmas on their own this year. Ashlynn wants to see if she can pull it off, sure, but really she is doing this because the thought of every child and aunt wanting to touch her belly, Brady sitting with Vander and whoever else mothing around him, her mom sneaking drinks in the bathroom, and her dad wanting to go home after thirty minutes, sounds harder than cooking, cleaning, and serving Brady’s parents.
Brady says Vander’s not happy, which makes Brady unhappy. Brady has worked his way closer and closer into Vander’s circle, both on clearing jobs and at family gatherings. Ever since getting lead for the 2A cut in Red Bird Forest five years ago, and ever since half of Vander’s younger brothers and nephews left him for the oil fields up north, Brady is one of only half a dozen family members who knows what he is doing. Vander can’t worry anymore about who came to the Troys through blood or through marriage.
What Ashlynn would really like to do is be alone, all alone but with Mellie sleeping next to her while she reads a thick series of paperbacks written for teens that she’s given up on being embarrassed about devouring.
Back inside, she puts the ham on the pan and then into the preheated oven, where it will bake for the next five hours. She turns off all the lights and climbs back upstairs.
Getting back in bed by Brady, it feels like the whole frame tilts with her weight. Brady doesn’t notice. Ashlynn almost wants to wake him. It would be something special to make love on Christmas morning, even their slow and strange kind of love making when her body is this big. But he is in the dark stage where she can pinch and push and shove and he is nothing but a body. More and more he is just a body and it feels rude or wrong but she touches him sometimes when he’s like that, not where she touches him to make love, but where she can’t touch him when he’s awake: his inner thigh, the inside of his arm just before the armpit hair, the space above his throat and below the line of his beard, the places kept turned in when he has the choice.
She falls asleep in seconds.
Lonna wakes up before anyone else on Christmas morning. She is in her daughter’s guestroom to help with Christmas.
She pats the wall for the light switch. In her daughter’s kitchen she turns on a light and can feel that the oven is on: someone must have forgotten last night. She switches it off. That’s a good way to burn a place down. Ashlynn and Brady might need her around more when the twins are born.
Lonna’s husband, Jay, thinks it is unnecessary to stay the night and will come over later, but that’s because men never know how much goes into Christmas morning, especially with Brady’s parents coming. Lonna said she could help with Christmas Eve dinner, too, but Ashy can be stubborn and try to do it all on her own. Brady’s never been a big help, drinking even more than Lonna does—Lonna returns to the guestroom to check her purse, where her water bottle of vodka is still secure.
For the first time since moving to Clayton when Ashlynn was in elementary school, they are not going to Lonna’s brother’s house for Christmas. Vander always puts up a show-off gigantic tree that needs a ladder to decorate, and he always has ideas for what the dozen kids, cousins, and grandkids or grandcousins or Lonna never knows what to call them, can do for fun. Christmas is always on Vander’s schedule, and everyone else has to spend the day thanking him for the gifts, thanking Jolene for the food that she spreads across their gigantic table in their gigantic dining room surrounded by windows. But those two, Vander and Jolene, don’t have a drop to drink even on celebrations like Christmas, which means Lonna always has to provide for herself.
Christmas should be all about making a kid feel special, which isn’t possible at Vander’s ranch. Ashlynn never got a Christmas to herself after they moved to Clayton, and Mellie hasn’t yet, either. This Christmas will be the most special Christmas of Mellie’s life, and the most relaxing of Ashy’s because of Lonna’s help. Mellie is an early riser and today Lonna will be ready for her so that Ashy can sleep in. Soon she won’t be sleeping at all with three kids and no help from Brady. Lonna will start the coffee and the fire. Everything will be ready when Ashy wakes up.
She accidentally knocks the coffee pot against the wall. She opens cupboards looking for grounds but when she finds them she sees the filter is already full and there’s water in the maker. She pushes on, hears it crackle. She grabs a small cup, pours in half an inch from her water bottle, fills the rest with water from the faucet.
After this Christmas Lonna will get back on track. She’ll get back to AA, will maybe call Cheryl Krane who moved to Idaho so many years ago that Lonna has lost count. Cheryl is still Lonna’s sponsor and still the only one who knows how low Lonna got during Ashy’s last year in high school, but Cheryl has never told. Or maybe Cheryl told her granddaughter, Karly, and maybe Karly told Ashlynn, and maybe it is Ashlynn who isn’t telling.
In the living room she turns on the lights to the tree. It is cold, as always, they never keep their heat on high enough. She opens the flue to the fireplace. The fire is already built, old newspaper and ripped up cereal boxes stuffed under the grate, small wood pieces on top, all ready for a match. Plenty of wood to the side, wood from Troy’s Trees that Vander donates to everyone in the family, even to Lonna and Jay though they’ve been fighting. She has to grant Vander that much.
Matches? There they are, on the mantle. Mellie has no stocking. Lonna should have brought stockings. Mellie might expect one because that’s how they do it at Vander’s. The mantle looks bare. Lonna lights the fire.
She put out gifts last night after everyone was in bed and, when she plugs in the lights to the tree, they look perfect. Even Ashy doesn’t know about them. Lonna made a trip to Target on that horrible seniors’ van that gives her a headache, but it was worth it. She also got tinsel, which she snuck in last night. Ashlynn says she hates tinsel because it’s a pain to clean up, but Mellie has never seen it, and Lonna will clean it up. Vander has cats so it has never been allowed. Lonna pulls handfuls of shiny strands from the cardboard sleeve and drapes them over the tree. Mellie will be awed. She will be awed the way Ashlynn was awed when they used tinsel for their Christmas in Texas. Ashy just doesn’t remember.
If only Lonna could drive to the store and get cinnamon rolls. She should have remembered at Target to get one of those tubes that pops open. She could show Mellie how to do it. When Ashy was little she would sit in Lonna’s lap as they curled the paper off the tube, waiting for the pop, which always made her laugh her head off.
The tinsel covers the tree. It shines like a waterfall.
Lonna pours another half inch from the water bottle. More water from the faucet on top. The coffee is done and it smells perfect.
Mellie’s door is still closed. None of this has woken her up yet. Lonna opens the door to check on her. She stirs. It looks like she stirs. “Ashy!” Lonna whispers. “Mellie,” she says, correcting, louder. “It’s Christmas morning!”
Mellie makes a cooing noise but doesn’t open her eyes. Lonna leaves the door open so that when Mellie does wake up, she’ll know it’s okay to come outside.
“Mellie,” she says again, just in case she is awake but thinks she’s not supposed to be. “It’s okay, it’s Christmas morning!”
“Mama?” Mellie says, her eyes squinting at the light coming in.
The fire pops and Lonna realizes she forgot to put up the screen, something Ashlynn always gets worried about, as if one coal could burn down a house. She doesn’t know where Ashlynn gets ideas like that; they had a fireplace for twenty years and it never happened to them. But she will put the screen up after she gets coffee. She pours herself a mug then lightens it from her water bottle and hears Mellie’s heavy steps and there she is in her doorway, her arms around a stuffed polar bear. Last year at Vander’s, all the kids got a stuffed polar bear and Jolene made a collage of a picture of each of the kids holding their bear and framed it for Vander’s sixty-fifth birthday present.
“Mama?” Mellie says, looking up toward the loft bedroom.
“Shh,” Lonna says, a finger over her mouth. “Mommy’s tired, let’s let her sleep in on Christmas. Look who came last night!” She points to the tree, the tinsel, the new pile of gifts, the most magical Christmas morning Mellie will ever have, all to herself.
Mellie’s eyes blossom.
“Merry Christmas!” Lonna says. “Come here, sweetie!” Lonna sits on the couch and opens her arms.
“Merry Cwismas,” Mellie says and runs to her grandma, her face fixed on the tree.
Lonna gently pulls the polar bear out of Mellie’s hand and whispers, “Should we open one?”
Mellie runs to the tree and picks up the box in bright pink paper with a bow stuck on top: Lonna tried to make ribbon do those curly-cues but gave up and sees that it doesn’t matter now. Mellie tears into the sparkling paper and Lonna sits near her, her coffee mug on the floor.
“She’s beautiful!” Lonna says when Barbie stares from her plastic case at Mellie. Ashlynn refuses to get Barbies for Mellie, but Lonna has told her so many times don’t worry about the cost, she will get the accessories when Mellie wants them. Ashlynn always says it’s not about that, always trying to hide how much she and Brady have to watch their money. Lonna knows now that she watched her money too much with Ashlynn growing up. But that was before Jay’s disability checks and before they know it, Lonna will be getting social security. It doesn’t have to be that way for Mellie.
“Her name’s Barbie,” Lonna says. “Isn’t she pretty?”
“More!” Mellie says.
“Shh,” Lonna reminds. She puts the sparkling paper in the fire and flames rush up to eat it. “Only one more. Which one?”
Lonna steers Mellie toward each present that she bought and wrapped, each unwrapping followed by a flare from throwing the paper in the fire. Lonna gets up for more coffee. After filling her mug she tips her water bottle but it is empty—she hadn’t started with it full, so she can look around for something of Brady’s for one last top-off, something he might have already open. She looks in cupboard after cupboard, some of them slam closed accidentally, and—here, up high above the mugs, a small collection of shooters. The first one she grabs is a vodka. She pours half of it in the mug and will save the second half for the last coffee of the day.
Back in the living room, Mellie has a book in her lap and wrapping paper Lonna doesn’t recognize by her side.
“Oops, honey, we weren’t supposed to open those,” Lonna says, but Mellie is already flipping over the brightly-colored pages, a new edition of the one with towers of hats that Lonna remembers reading to Ashlynn.
Lonna goes to the bathroom, keeping the door open to hear if Mellie needs anything. When she comes back there are two more skins of unfamiliar paper and the area beneath the tree is empty.
“What else did Santa bring?” Lonna says, since what’s done is done. Mellie has another book and some other doll that isn’t Barbie stuck behind a plastic box.
Lonna hears steps on the stairs from the loft. She looks up from the floor, her back against the couch, Mellie at her side now driving Barbie in one of her new rollerblades. Ashlynn takes two steps for each stair, pausing with both feet on each ledge. She stops with only a few steps left, large enough that if someone else wanted to get by her they wouldn’t be able to. Lonna has told Ashlynn all her life the tricks to control her weight, but Ashy never listened, and she has grown and grown since high school. Now she is larger than Lonna ever imagined, carrying her own weight and twins who are almost at term, her due date just after the New Year. She is like her father, he with the XXL button downs, the high blood pressure, high cholesterol, the stent. Lonna worries for both of them, their bodies getting too big for their hearts.
