Ed wants to know why Sheryl didn’t bake her choco-coconut cookies for Wednesday fellowship. “I’m taking the papers over to Mama this evening,” she tells him.
From the jumble of shirts he has flung on the bed, Ed selects a long-sleeved pin-stripe more suited to the office than a mid-week weenie roast with the Disciples of Harmony.
“Better get her to sign them. Lawyer says if she doesn’t get on it, the scouts for Quail Hollow will buy another parcel.”
Sheryl walks Ed to the car, happy to see him off, thinking she’ll take a breather to water the blanket flowers and black-eyed Susans, knowing how grateful they’ll be. Ed rolls down the window and talks over loud Christian rock. “You could have at least made some kinda dessert. Now I gotta stop at Krispy Kreme.” Ed thinks he’s too young to wear a hearing aid. Sheryl thinks he’s too vain.
Just beyond range of the diamond-bright spray Sheryl aims at the honeysuckle, a swallowtail butterfly lands on milkweed. It’s wings part, and then fold, like praying hands. Sheryl knows it’s a swallowtail by the photos she’s studied in Mama’s wildlife magazines. Mama gets them when she donates to what Ed calls the green people. He thinks she gives too much, and besides, she forgets to record the checks. Sheryl pulls the hose to the edge of her lot. The neighbor across the street, who moved in a month ago, emerges from her door and waves her over. She switches the water pump off, sorry to forfeit what’s left of the balmy afternoon, disappoint the accidental sunflowers who sprung from birdseed, their thirsty faces upturned, expectant.
Sheryl’s little Florida town has been discovered. It depresses her to think that most newcomers don’t do their homework. This one stands, cross-armed and grim-mouthed, on the chem-lawned rye grass that she wrestled from the puny soil and which Sheryl knows is doomed, come June. She can’t remember where the woman is from, Nebraska, or one of the Dakotas.
“Look at this hole!” the woman says. Sheryl follows her point to a flattened lip of dirt skirting a tunnel descending below a dome of earth. They walk over to a barren patch under the only tree left standing in the yard, an old live oak. Sheryl kneels and peers into the freshly sculpted home of a gopher tortoise. Delighted, she straightens up.
“You’ve got a gopher tortoise!”
The woman looks stricken. Says she doesn’t want a turtle in her yard. “Not a turtle,” Sheryl counters. “It’s a tortoise. From ancient times. Not many left now. It’s protected in Florida, you can google Fish & Wildlife and see pictures.” The woman jabs her finger at the house catercorner, to which another newcomer from the frozen tundra moved a year ago.
“He says it’s a snapping turtle. They’re dangerous. I’m going to cement this hole and put paving stones on top.” Sheryl tells the woman that snapping turtles live in swamps. That the wetlands near town were filled-in. The woman keeps her focus on the catercorner house, as if willing the man to come out his door and tell Sheryl what’s what. “I don’t want a turtle in my yard.” She shifts her frown to the live oak, whose Spanish moss shades her windows and fringes her gutters. Who’s as old as Methuselah. When the woman goes back inside, Sheryl puts her hand on the trunk’s heart. Regal queen, she whispers, I think your days are numbered. Your reign is over.
An hour before dark, Sheryl reaches the turn-off for the crushed shell driveway that leads to her childhood home. It winds a half-mile around what Daddy called a flatlander’s hill, before leveling off at the front door. When she sees Mama and a Fish & Wildlife uniform bent over something at the foot of the drive, she parks alongside 281.
The latest fatalities are sprawled in the wild phlox that hides Mama’s mailbox. “This here,” Mama says, is Officer Schmidt.” Sheryl says hello to the uniform, who looks all of seventeen. The three of them gaze at a doe with a caved rump and a fawn barely out of spots, blood garish on its coat of muted tawny-brown. “Officer Schmidt says he can’t do nothing officially, but I can put up them shiny yellow signs that say Deer Crossing.” Schmidt toes the mother deer’s hoof. His radio crackles. He tells them he’s gotta go, but he’ll call county Waste-Pro in the morning. Sheryl crosses the highway to her car, shoves the offer to buy under the seat before Mama gets in to ride up the drive.
They don’t much talk until the dishes are washed and they’re settled on the porch swing. “The Quail Hollow people called about putting up Coming Soon billboards on 281,” Mama says. “Right on the property line. And I haven’t even signed the papers yet.”
A waking barred owl coos, soft and low, to his mate. Sheryl marvels that’s it quiet enough on the porch, removed enough from the 24/7 buzz below, to follow the couple’s call and response. “Did you hear that?” she asks Mama.
“Oh, those two! They’ve moved into your Daddy’s sycamore. Their babies will be safe there. “Till the backhoes come.” Sheryl picks up one of Mama’s green people magazines, flips pages in the fading light. “I know Ed thinks I’m losing my marbles, got bats in my belfry. But I can’t stand that killing on 281. All of ‘em rushing to get to the beach. Little orphaned possums and swelled-up silver racoons, even a smushed bobcat, paying their speeding tolls for’em.” Mama stops the creaking swing with her feet. “Ed phoned me ‘fore you got here. Said you was bringing the contract for me to sign. Said Senior Villas has an opening in the independent wing. And I can move to assisted if I need to.”
Sheryl gazes at a full page spread of a formidable looking armadillo. She holds the picture at an angle to the setting sun, which glazes the scalloped plates with gold. “I didn’t,” she says, bring the offer. It’s up to you, Mama. I can never bring the offers. If you don’t sign, they just die, expire.”
“I do carry-on, don’t I honey, about boat oil up the creek and trespassing poachers and all that…roadkill. Ed says it’s not normal.”
Sheryl hands Mama the armadillo article. “Don’t mind Ed,” she says, entertaining a sudden vision of Ed gone, not dead, but maybe run off with the church secretary, the closet purged of his frumpy shirts, and her single again, bedding down on this sleeping porch, listening to owls pillow-talk. “Maybe the wheeler-dealers who build old folkeries like Senior Villas, with prison slits for windows, are the ones who aren’t normal.”
“Maybe so,” says Mama. She holds up the magazine, taps the armadillo with her index finger. “He don’t know all this armor won’t do him no good. Reckon I could, if I hold onto this place? And he don’t go down the drive?”
“Absolutely!” Sheryl says and Mama laughs. Moving in tandem, they re-start the swing, set a brisk rhythm that takes them higher, makes the rusty chains sing.
–
Claire Massey is a former prose editor for The Emerald Coast Review and current poetry editor for The Pen Woman magazine. Her work won awards in the short memoir and flash fiction categories in the 2017 and 2022 International Soul-Making Keats Literary competition. Among other journals, her stories have appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review, Saw Palm Journal of Florida Literature and Art, Halfway Down the Stairs, Barely South Review and Bright Flash Literary Review. Driver Side Window, her collection of poems and prose, is available from Amazon and other bookstores.
© 2023, Claire Massey
Halfway Down the Stairs 