By Isabella Jensen
Mary leaned against the veranda railing and blew steam from her china teacup. Across the road, a spray of mist from a beat-down garden hose clung to the bare shoulders of her neighbour’s son, and foam dripped from the curves of his 1960s Chevrolet onto sodden grass.
He caught Mary watching and flashed a crooked grin—rose-flush rising to her cheeks before she looked away. He wiped his brow and offered her a wave. Mary shifted her weight and lifted up her tea, thinking that she would perhaps invite him around for dinner. After all, she had just finished setting the table for two. Today was her baby’s eighth birthday.
The boy jogged over, stopping a metre from Mary’s chipped-paint stairs, and ran wet fingers through his hair.
The gesture pulled her backwards—reminding her of Sven.
“I go back to college on Monday,” the neighbour boy said, chest glistening in the late suburban summer sun.
“Dinner tonight?” she said, and the boy just smiled. “I’ll see you here at seven.”
He ran back to his Chevy, the crimson polish glowing like hot embers amid a burnt-out fire and turned off the garden hose. Mary sipped her tea, disappointed that it wasn’t something stronger and walked inside. Her mind slipped into a dangerous loop—replaying that sun-tanned hand rippling through golden waves of hair. Just like Sven. Her Sven.
Back when Mary was younger, she had smoked too many cigarettes and drank with strangers until the dawn cracked in brilliant oranges against smog-stained city skies. She had met a handsome, slick-haired man named Sven in the springtime of ’89, and he had taught her how to drive in his daddy’s cherry Chevrolet.
Sven had taken Mary on a weekend trip up north, somewhere just past Kansas, when she was seventeen or so. She remembered how his tobacco scent lingered in the leather of her purse, and the way his tongue felt as it traced the crooks of her salt-lime coated neck in the back of dimly lit bars. Mary liked the feeling of getting drunk on Sven, and she had decided quickly between road signs and motel rooms that he was hers forever. Her mother told her it was not love, rather “infatuation”, and Mary swore and screamed and tore through the woman like a wildfire through dry timber.
The day Sven took off caught Mary by surprise. She had woken with a hangover and a note he’d scrawled in a messy charcoal rush, reducing everything to a seasonal fling summed up in three painful, loveless words. Its been fun, Sven had written. No apostrophe, as careless as his crafted goodbye. Mary smashed the previous night’s red-stained glasses in the porcelain hotel sink, sparkling shards marking a poetic finale that laughed at her with irony.
When the baby came, her mother took him in and raised him as Mary’s brother, and a quiet discontent settled on Mary’s chest. She became a shell, enveloped by the lingering smell of diaper duty and nights soundtracked by her own choked sobs and a wailing babe down the hall. Mary was left with a scar carved into her heart and tequila-clouded memories of dust and diesel road trips from a time that seemed simpler.
Now, Mary avoided her son—the spitting image of his father—brewed clumsy, too-hot cups of tea and watched the neighbour boy scrub the windows of his Chevy, smiling when he waved to pretend that the sight of him did not still rip her heart in two. At night, Mary told herself that life alone suited her “just fine”, and she would sleep restlessly until the dawn crept through the corners of her bedroom, bringing with it that stone-in-stomach feeling she could not seem to shake.
The doorbell rang.
Mary brushed the creases of her dress. The neighbour boy stood outside with flowers in hand, hair slicked back, a tie hanging crooked around his neck.
Of course he had done his hair like that.
Mary ignored the ringing and locked herself in the bathroom—wishing the world would stop.
In time, the doorbell ceased to sound, and loose petals scattered atop the doormat marked the end of that summer’s fling. By Monday evening, the Chevy would be gone, the boy at college, and Mary would find a crack in her bedroom wall—reason enough to break her lease and find somewhere new to live.
