“Country Living”
by Zoe Abramson

When their last child left home, Lorna and her husband moved to an old farm in the country to start something new. On their new old farm, she and Gary cut back the blackberries, planted kale. Her older daughter laughed on the phone when Lorna told her about Gary’s plans to build a chicken coop. “You’re filling your empty nest,” the daughter said. Lorna had said nothing, had let it pass, and in a moment the taste vanished from the joke like flavor dissolving from gum. It wasn’t the pun Lorna was hurt by: they had brought the girls up on wordplay, banter that escalated around the dinner table until one or all of them was in tears, laughing, choking on the floor, Gary threatening to send in the dog to Lich everyone’s Heims. No, it wasn’t the pun: it was that Lorna had never thought her life would become so literal.

The day her daughter comes in from the city, they take her on a tour of the farm: the blueberry bower, the wild redcurrants. The peach tree they have painstakingly won back from the worms, Lorna up at five most days, spritzing its leaves with rosemary and witch hazel. The daughter squints at the blackberries, checks her phone.  She lives on her phone now, a smartphone they got her on the family plan. It is the last thing Gary and Lorna still pay for. The data plan is a small fortune each month, but Lorna likes holding onto this finite piece of her child. She examines the monthly bill as if for clues—the girls text more than they talk, she tells Gary over grits and fresh eggs. Hundreds of texts, dwarfing the minutes spent talking. Lorna doesn’t text, uses almost no minutes herself. She calls the newspaper occasionally, or a plumber.  Her parents once a week. Talking to Gary and the girls on the plan doesn’t count as minutes, which seems apt in a way that fills Lorna, in quiet moments, with a rage that frightens her with its intensity.

They are at the chicken run when the daughter’s phone flutters brightly to life again. It is because of this, or because of the private smile that has crept across her daughter’s face, that Lorna remarks, “One of the hens was fucked to death.”

The daughter lowers her phone. There is an expression on her face that is halfway to a smile, waiting for the familiar weight of a joke to anchor it into place.

Gary says, amenably, “Well, maybe. We’re not sure. She might have impaled herself on something.”

“There was a gaping hole in her ass,” Lorna says, by way of explanation. “Her body cavity was crawling with maggots by the time Gary found her.”

Gary nods, says vaguely, “She was the rooster’s favorite.”

The daughter looks from one parent to the other, slaps a mosquito. The smile evaporates. In the woods behind them, the cicadas drone shhhhhhtshhhtshhh.

They go inside for a simple dinner. The cell phone is put away. They do not say grace. There is corn on the cob, sweet, and Lorna’s homemade bread. Gary takes a slice, proclaiming himself a crusty old man, and the daughter tells him not to be so corny. There is chicken, too, about which there is no comment.

After dinner they step out onto the lawn together under the darkening sky. The daughter walks ahead with Lorna’s husband, laughing about something. They were bright, her girls. Pretty, too, though neither of them were straightforward enough to believe this thing of themselves. Lorna looks at the older daughter now, at the slenderness of her waist cut out against the waning sky, and remembers how her own figure had gone: slowly, gently, with years of neglect. The gym memberships let lapse, the single classes of yoga attended with the best of intentions. Lorna had always been a willowy woman, and the thought of having to work for it deeply offends her. It feels like a betrayal. How could her body leave her in this way? She will be thin again, she senses. These things come in cycles, surely. The seasons, the rising and setting of the sun—why not, too, our bodies, our youth? And yet, her waist creeps inexorably toward thickness; cellulite popcorning her thighs. Youth, she thinks, is truly wasted on—and stops herself, because if anything, at least Lorna has never been a cliché, and she does not intend to start now.

Lorna watches city daughter grimacing across the dusky lawn in sandals and lipstick, and wonders what ever happened to her barefoot, scab-kneed, gap-toothed girl child. Wonders why she felt that these were the accoutrements she had to don in order to grow up. She thinks back to her daughter’s face at the henhouse, mouth twisted like laundry wrung out by hand, and wonders at the pleasure she found there. Thinks back to the days when her girls listened to her, curled at her knee, reading to them again and again, for the eighty-sixth time, Green Eggs and Ham, changing the words just to see if she could get away with it, to save her own mind from unraveling. And the day that came when they knew the book better than Seuss did, were pressing wakefulness enough against the retreating barrier of bedtime to protest, that’s not how it goes. Inflexible little girl minds, insisting: not in a house, not with a mouse. She is grateful, after all these years, to again be able to surprise her daughter with language. After all these years, to have something new to say.