Sheri Reynolds fiction short story Covenants

Title image by Pam McKnight, Edwards Street, 8″x 8″, Acrylic on Paper, 2025.

Covenants

by Sheri Reynolds

Me and this lady I work for, we’re out in the back yard one day, and out of the blue she says, “Jackie, let’s string up a clothesline!”

“You gotta be kidding,” I tell her. “You’ve got a perfectly good dryer in there.” Her dryer’s practically new – one of those front loaders big enough to handle sleeping bags – and with her three kids dirtying up everything in creation, she needs a big dryer. We go through more laundry than the old lady who lived in the shoe.

“Oh, I know it,” she says, “but I miss the smell of clothes dried in sunshine.”

“Well, where do you want me to string it?” I ask – cause she’s the one who signs my paycheck. If she wants fresh air on her clothes, what’s it to me? She’s a big-hearted lady with the wildest head of hair you’ve ever seen. Her name’s Mrs. Bennett. She’s married to Dr. Bennett, the radiologist at the hospital, and they have a mess of little Bennetts running through the house, tracking mud and smudging up the walls with playdough fingerprints.

So out we go — to the back yard — and she says to me, “Don’t you remember how good clothes smell when they’re line-dried?”

“You bet,” I say. “Nothing else like it.” But really, I’m thinking about rubbing down with bristly old bath towels rough as rawhide or putting on jeans so stiff the knees won’t bend for half a day and you walk around feeling like the Tin Man. 

Not to mention the bird mess.  

“You don’t want to run your clothesline there, Mrs. Bennett,” I tell her. “That tree’s full of purple berries. Imagine your sheets after the birds do their business.”

She thinks that’s funny, so I indulge her: “Even your bras will end up tie-dyed.” She laughs and laughs at the thought of it. She’s finally stopped asking me to call her Chloe, after ten years of trying to convince me that we’re equals. Maybe she finally understands that I’m not mad about it, but I’m not acting the part to make her feel better, either.

There aren’t many places in the backyard suitable for her clothesline. In one corner, Mrs. Bennett has a shed where she does her arts and crafts, plus some raised beds where she grows greens and little warped carrots. The children’s playhouse is off to the other side of the yard. Then there’s the pool.

“We could string up a pulley,” I suggest. “You could reel your clothes back and forth across the water like they do in high-rises in Italy.” 

“You are too much, Jackie,” Mrs. Bennett says. The phone rings, and she answers it, and I do a little weeding, since I’m standing by the arugula bed anyhow.

When I was a girl, we used a regular old washing machine and dryer, except for when the dryer broke and we couldn’t afford to get it fixed. Then we hung our clothes on the line. I watched the sky constantly, hoping I wouldn’t have to blow-dry my underpants, and since then, I have never craved the smell of fresh air on my pajamas. I like the smell of dryer sheets just fine, mountain-rain scented, thank you very much.

But Mrs. Bennett’s a charmer. She laughs in a way that reminds you deep in your belly of an old-time thrill: being pushed too high on the playground swing and feeling your rear-end lift. She’s the only woman I know who whistles, and even though I’m embarrassed sometimes when she does it at the drugstore, you can’t help being impressed. She can trill her way through “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” from start to finish. Mrs. Bennett was in school six or seven years behind me, the same age as my baby brother who had bladder disease. Many of the children made fun of him because he smelled like pee and had to wear diapers, but Mrs. Bennett — named Chloe Hemingway back then — was always good to him. They were in seventh grade when he died, and she read a poem she wrote at his funeral. 

For these reasons, I forgive her for assuming I appreciate clothes dried on the line because I grew up in the country or for thinking I admire her for not allowing her children to have cell phones or social media accounts until they’re teenagers.

My own daughter is ten. Not only does she have a smartphone, but she produces and posts weekly videos about bugs she finds and the little houses she makes for them. What Mrs. Bennett doesn’t understand is that her children never have to spend weekends with their irresponsible daddy and his hobo sidekicks. Privilege isn’t what it used to be. These days you’re lucky if you don’t need a cell phone.

Mrs. Bennett’s still on hers, talking over the program for Master Gardener commencement, and since it’s time for me to pick up Jason from basketball camp, I grab the keys to her Suburban and head out. All the way there, I’m thinking about how Mrs. Bennett makes the world a better place just by being in it. She fixes soup for sick people and raises money for the Children’s Hospital. She even puts bumper stickers on her car reminding people to coexist and be kind. But she’s got time on her hands, and that gives her the freedom to be kind. 

It’s easier to be kind if you can afford to pay somebody else to empty your dishwasher. 

Jason’s waiting outside the school gym. He hops in the back and talks all the way home about his layups and free throws, and when we get back, Mrs. Bennett’s standing in the front yard with a long piece of nylon rope strung between two trees. Her rope’s already sagging, but she’s determined. When I haul out the wet clothes and throw them over (we don’t have any clothespins yet), the middle ones drag the grass. We have to push the clothes to either end and hoist up the center with a wobbly rake. 

It turns out that there’s a no-clothesline covenant in town. The very next morning, Dr. Bennett gets a call at work. He’s the one who tells Mrs. Bennett that she needs to take it down.

“Not a chance,” she replies. “Why are they calling you anyway? They know I’m at home, and they call you at work? That’s ridonkulous.” She’s taken to saying that – ridonkulous – like she invented it.

I grab the leaf blower and head out to clear debris off the pool deck while they talk. 

Mrs. Bennett has big opinions on just about everything. She buys nothing made in China because the government mistreats its laborers, nothing from Wal-Mart because they force out small businesses (and all their merchandise comes from China anyway). When we go shopping together, it’s usually to the natural foods co-op where tomato sauce costs five dollars a can. But Mrs. Bennett’s proud of her browning bananas and filthy sweet potatoes that nobody’s bothered to hose down. She pays thirteen dollars for a little bag of coffee and smiles like the farmers in Ecuador are working the cash register.

And get this: one day Mrs. Bennett spent two hundred and fifty dollars for a juicer — one you can put cucumbers or beets or cabbage in. It’ll make juice out of anything at all, even your fingers if you stick them in there far enough. She says to me, “Jackie, what’s been bothering you?” and I think she heard about my sister who’s using pills again, but I say, “Nothing,” and she says, “Surely something’s bothering you. Everybody’s got something,” so I just shrug, and she laughs and says, “Do you have arthritis, or constipation, or anything?”

“Oh,” I say. “Well, I get urinary tract infections sometimes.”

“I’ll look it up in my juicing book,” she says. “I know that for constipation, you combine cabbage and carrot.”

“I’ll pass on that one,” I tell her, and she laughs. I do love to watch Mrs. Bennett laugh. She’s got twinkling green eyes that disappear into nothing but stars.

When she laughs like that, I forgive her for thinking she’s being so economical just because she uses the dehydrated carrot pulp to make muffins, and yes, I even drink her whole lemon purée, which will just about take your breath but is supposedly the best thing for lady-parts and problems. She puts in the whole lemon – seeds, skin, and all – a hunk of ginger, a little bit of molasses (she gets all this at the natural food store), and oh, you can hardly stand it. We put it in the blender with a bunch of ice cubes just to make it tolerable, and then I say, “Mrs. Bennett, the only way we’ll be able to get this down is if we add some vodka,” and by God, she gets out the vodka, and I haven’t had a bladder infection since.

When I’ve blown every leaf, berry, and bug to the far edges of the yard and plugged in the battery for next time, I head on over to find Mrs. Bennett, who’s moping in a lounge chair by the pool. 

“Explain this to me, Jackie,” she says. “It’s okay in this town for people to sit out on their porches drinking beer all day or for men to dangle testicles from the trailer hitches of their trucks, but it’s not okay for me to hang my clothes on the line to dry? What kind of logic is that?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Bennett. It doesn’t make sense.”

“There are even people who fly the Confederate flag!” she exclaims. “How can my clean clothes be more offensive than the Confederate flag?”

I shake my head. It does seem ridonkulous.

“Well, if they want me to take down my clothesline, they can come tell me to my face. What a bunch of bull malarkey!”

She decides to wash her bedroom curtains, and while they’re in the machine, she sends me out to buy clothespins – wooden ones – and a more official clothesline, one of the lightweight plastic-coated ones. I don’t know if she prefers green or beige, so I bring her one of each, making sure to unwrap them in advance so she won’t see the ‘Made in China’ stickers. We rig the beige line between two fat columns on her front porch. 

I stand on a stepladder so I can tie it nice and tight, and Mrs. Bennett brings me a hammer. “Put in a nail so it won’t slide down,” she tells me, and I do it, even though they just had those columns refinished and painted.

We hang the green clothesline in the front yard, too. On this one, she displays all her bras and underpants. “Let’s see what Town Council thinks of this,” she says.  

In the attic, she finds a retractable clothesline that she used back in college. We screw that one into a big oak tree and stretch it halfway across the side yard, where we secure it to a fence post. It’s on a slant and not the best for clothes, but it works fine for airing out all the outgrown stuffed animals she’s decided to donate to the thrift store.

In a matter of hours, we have four clotheslines visible from the street, all loaded down with wash. Good thing the Bennetts live on a triple lot. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have the space.

The next few days are busy with oil changes for the cars, meetings of the garden club, dental appointments for the kids, and a doctor’s appointment for Mrs. Bennett. In between, we wash up everything in sight: shower curtains, throw rugs, you name it. So, I’ve almost forgotten about the no-clothesline ordinance when a letter arrives from the town manager, addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Bennett both, asking them to kindly comply with the restrictive covenants of the neighborhood. They’ve included a copy of those covenants, with the one about clotheslines highlighted in yellow.

As soon as Mrs. Bennett pulls out the list, I know we’re in for a time. 

I live out in the county, not in town proper, so as far as I know, we can hang our underwear in the front yard if we feel like it, though people rarely do. We can paint our houses hot pink trimmed in purple if we take a notion. Certainly, we can have chickens. My own mother has a chicken coop.

“No livestock for breeding or profit,” Mrs. Bennett reads. “Does that mean I can keep chickens as long as I don’t sell the eggs?”

“I think so,” I tell her. “But chickens make a terrible mess, and they’ll scratch up everything in your garden.”

So, she settles on a goat. We all load up in the Suburban: me, Mrs. Bennett, the littlest girl and boy (the older one’s away at camp), and off we go on a goat-hunt. First stop, the Feed-N-Grain, where we look at business cards and announcements on a bulletin board until we find a nearby farmer with goats a’plenty. 

The children love the baby goats and hold them in their arms like kittens. They flip them upside down and rub their bellies and laugh to see their fleas jump and burrow around their eyes. The babies look like tiny devils with their nubs of horns coming through. But Mrs. Bennett wants to make a bigger statement, so we end up with a juvenile, a billy. He has to ride in the very back, where he gobbles up a map of North Carolina before we can get back to the house.

We tie him to the same tree as one of the clotheslines – in the front yard, of course. Before you know it, he’s nabbed a pair of swim trunks and chews them sideways to shreds. Mrs. Bennett plays tug-of-war to get them back. She just laughs about it, but since they have a pool, everybody in the house has four or five swimsuits anyway. It won’t hurt anybody to be one short.

“Where’s he gonna sleep?” I ask her.  

“I’m building him a pen,” she declares, and I think to myself, Sweet Jesus.

Mrs. Bennett and the children spend most of the afternoon in her shed, where she keeps her table saw and other tools, along with a sewing machine, a pottery wheel, and an easel. From the kitchen window, I watch her haul out her sawhorses and some lumber she keeps for just these kinds of projects. She’s still sawing and hammering away when the doorbell rings.

It’s Mr. Seymour, who owns a bed & breakfast down the street. The goat has chewed through his rope and wandered into the Seymour’s yard where he’s made fast work of the knock-out roses, as well as the pineapple welcome flag.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” says Mrs. Bennett. She’s wearing her protective earmuffs pushed sideways on her head, with one ear uncovered so she can hear him. “Come on in and have some lemonade. I’ll write you a check.”

When Mr. Seymour is placated and gone, Mrs. Bennett admits that maybe the goat wasn’t her finest idea, though she’ll never understand why that pineapple welcome flag was flying so low in the first place. We switch out the goat’s rope for a lightweight chain, and I help her bring the three-sided goat house into the front yard. It’s a little wobbly, but sturdier than I expected. She adjusts the hinges for maximum stability, shores it up with bricks around the bottom, and lays a piece of plywood on top for a roof. Voilà.

One of the children asks, “Do you think he’ll be okay out here by himself at night?” and Mrs. Bennett says, “Oh, sure he will, honey. Doesn’t it look like the place where Jesus was born? If it was good enough for Jesus, it’ll do for our little billy-goat!”

There’s a bale of hay still in the back of the Suburban, and I retrieve it for Mrs. Bennett. I’m not sure if the goat’s supposed to eat the hay or sleep on it, so I just leave it next to the lean-to and let her decide.

The next morning, I bring my daughter with me to work. My mother’s with my sister, who has a court date, and there’s nowhere else for my daughter to stay. Mrs. Bennett’s more than accommodating. She’s a great advocate for children and their parents. She’s even held meetings with the board of trustees at the local hospital, trying to get low-cost on-site childcare for all hospital employees. She’s offered to let me bring my daughter every day, but I don’t. Mrs. Bennett hugs my daughter and ushers her directly to the pool, where the two littlest Bennetts are playing. Unlike the goat, my daughter causes no trouble at all. 

The goat, on the other hand, eats most of the leaves off the hedge that separates the Bennett’s yard from the Chun’s. Evidently, he doesn’t like his new bedroom or his hay. He head-butts anybody who gets close. When he poops, a piece of pineapple welcome flag gets stuck halfway-in-halfway-out. Mrs. Bennett thinks it’s hilarious. She runs around behind him trying to grab at it with a rag. Finally, she gets it, yanks, and runs screaming the other way.  

After that, the goat (they’ve named him Nibbler) doesn’t want to be her friend. Each time she comes near, he lowers that head and snuffs. “What are we gonna do with you?” she says and hoots with laughter. 

Dr. Bennett, who hasn’t yet left for the hospital, paces the porch and warns, “Chloe, you’re going to get us thrown out of this neighborhood,” and she replies, “Oh phooey. The worst thing that will happen is they’ll fine us. Big deal.”

To some people, it would be a very big deal, but Mrs. Bennett is the kind of person who gets away with breaking rules. I can’t tell if that’s a good thing for my daughter to see or not.

Mrs. Bennett’s got ladders already set up in the front yard and gallons of paint. “Jackie,” she tells me, “Today we’re painting the shutters.” 

“Shouldn’t we take them down first?” I ask.

“We can just tape around them,” she says. “You start on the bottom. I’ll go up on the porch roof and see how high I can reach.”

Their house is a big white Victorian, bright as a frosted wedding cake, with shutters and trim in deep forest green. Each year at Christmas, we hang wreaths with red holly berries on all those windows, and with the green trim and the red ribbon twining the porch rails, it’s the most beautiful Christmas house around. I’ve thought of taking a picture and using it as my Christmas card – but it isn’t my house.

Now Mrs. Bennett’s decided to change the shutters to fiery orange, one of the colors specifically excluded in the town covenants.  

On the way to his Volvo, briefcase in hand, Dr. Bennett looks back and says, “Chloe, no!”

“Victor, yes!” shouts Mrs. Bennett from up on the porch roof. She laughs and reassures him: “We can paint it back if you don’t like it! Let’s just see how it turns out.”

He’s still shaking his head as he drives off to work. It’s a wonder he doesn’t kill her.

We spend the whole morning wiping down shutters with the dust mop, taping around them and brushing on a first coat of paint. During our breaks, we hang more clothes on the line. The children run in and out of the pool and try to play with the goat, who keeps getting his chain wrapped up around the tree and bleating like he’s gone to slaughter. 

I try not to make eye contact with any of the neighbors who pass, stopping and gawking. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not embarrassed. I know there’s a place in this world for defiance, but it just takes so much work. So, I keep my back to the cars that slow down. Mrs. Bennett, on the other hand, waves to them all. “Hi, Kate,” she shouts. “Hi, Mrs. Needham.” 

One neighbor, Mrs. Crabtree, says, “Chloe Bennett, have you lost your mind?”

“I didn’t expect you to like it!” Mrs. Bennett exclaims. “It’s Clemson orange. Everybody knows you’re a UNC fan!” She gives me a sideways wink.

“The historical review board will have a stroke,” shouts Mrs. Crabtree.

“But it’s discriminatory for them to allow Carolina Blue and not Clemson Orange!” Mrs. Bennett yells back. 

She’s speckled with paint. It’s in her hair, in her eyelashes. She’s gotten too much sun, and her cheeks are flushed and freckled. When Mrs. Crabtree has gone, she climbs down off the porch roof, stretches out on her back in the grass, and just whoops with happiness.  

I collapse there beside her and dab sweat from my face with my shirt. “Why are you doing this?” I ask her.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “But I can’t stop now. I swear, Jackie, I think it’s the most fun I’ve ever had.”

I feel a little bit sorry for Mrs. Bennett then. When she’s not trying to be useful, she’s trying to make a point – but she’s always trying and can never just be. All that money, all that time, and she’s still desperate to figure out what she stands for.

We both sit back and look at the half-painted shutters. There’s orange, and then there’s orange. I’m about to suggest that we drive over to the hardware store and see if they can tone it down a notch when Mrs. Bennett checks the phone. She’s missed a text from her husband.

We assume, of course, that he’s heard more complaints about all the broken covenants. Instead, he tells her that he finally had a chance to read her mammogram; there’s a spot he doesn’t like the looks of. He tells her not to worry, but to come back to the hospital to repeat it. 

Unlike most folks, Mrs. Bennett doesn’t need an appointment. She has a standing appointment when shadows show up on her mammograms, though this is the first time it’s happened. With this news, the ladders and paint, they all come down. Mrs. Bennett tries to make light of it, saying it’s probably nothing, saying we’ll get back to the shutters tomorrow. She goes inside for a shower and stays in her room the entire time I wrap the brushes in saran wrap, hammer lids back onto paint cans, fold up tarps and find the turpentine.

Her cheer sounds false when she tells the children goodbye: “Stay here and play,” she says. “And listen to Jackie! Don’t cause her a bit of trouble!”

“Where are you going?” the littlest one asks, but Mrs. Bennett just waves goodbye. I can tell she’s trying not to panic, even though she’s still smiling.

I wipe the paint off the phone and get a sponge to dab at the bits of orange fingerprints Mrs. Bennett’s left on the molding beside the door, but it’s too late.  

The children come out of the pool, dry off, eat popsicles, and I send them to their playhouse to do crafts. My daughter asks what’s the matter, and I tell her that everybody just needs some quiet time. She goes outside with the laundry basket, visits the goat, and collects all the dry clothes on the line. 

Then we sit in the family room, just me and my daughter, folding the Bennett’s laundry. We make stacks for the children’s t-shirts and shorts, Dr. Bennett’s striped boxers, Mrs. Bennett’s beige bras. My daughter shakes out each piece before she folds it, in case any ants or spiders have taken up residence there. She tucks Mrs. Bennett’s bra cups one inside the other. 

I reach for a sheet from the laundry basket, and my daughter digs around to find the other two corners. “Thank the good Lord for fitted sheets,” I tell her. 

She cuts her eyes at me like I’m nuts, but she does her best to tuck in the extra fabric before bringing her corners to meet up with mine. 

“Just goes to show you that not everything in this life can be folded up neatly,” I explain. “Not everything should.”

But my daughter’s in no mood for philosophy. “What’s gonna happen to Nibbler?” she asks.

“He’ll get neutered, for one thing,” I tell her. “Then he’ll act a whole lot nicer.”

In a little bit, she goes off to help the Bennett children make puppets, and I get the iPad and look up some numbers for Mrs. Bennett – housepainters and veterinarians who make farm-calls. I get started on supper and fix saffron rice to go with the chicken I’m baking, making enough for us to take home, as is our custom.  

In a little while, Mrs. Bennett is back. I hear her car door slam. The children come running to invite her to their puppet show, and she says she’ll be there in a little while. “Have a dress rehearsal,” she tells them. “Then Jackie and I will come watch.”

She motions me to the study and closes the door. “It’s probably just a calcification,” she says. “Those are usually benign.” She pulls up an image of her mammogram on her laptop. “See?” she says and points.

“I guess,” I say. “Sort of.” But I don’t know what I’m looking at. I wonder if everybody can get copies of their mammograms. I’ve never asked for copies of mine – which is probably a good thing. If I had a copy of my mammogram and somebody found a spot on it, I’d look at it way too much. I’d get up in the night to study that spot. 

Mrs. Bennett switches to a picture of a chest x-ray. “They don’t usually do chest x-rays before needle biopsies,” she tells me. “But for some reason Victor wanted me to have one.”

Her ribs look fine, as far as I can see, but that’s no surprise. 

Then Mrs. Bennett unbuttons her top and shrugs out of it. She rolls down her bra and stands there before me. “Do you see anything suspicious?” she asks. “Do you think that’s a dimple?”

She has full pale breasts and fat brown nipples with two or three stray hairs, long and dark like spider legs, growing around each one. At times in my life, I’ve found hairs poking up where they shouldn’t, but I always yanked them out when they were short. 

“They look okay to me,” I tell her. But what do I know? I move her over to the window where the light’s better and try again. “What does Dr. Bennett think?”

“He says we’ll have to wait for the biopsy.” She sighs. “He goes back and forth between acting like a professional and acting like my father. But I could use a fucking husband.” 

I’ve never heard her use the f-word before.

“I thought he might come home early tonight, but apparently he can’t.” She rolls her eyes and grabs my hand. “Feel,” she says. She takes my fingers and guides them to her right breast, to the underside of her nipple. I’m surprised by how clammy her skin is. “Do you feel anything?” 

I only hesitate a moment before I oblige her, kneading like I’m making biscuits, searching the dough for stubborn lumps. “No, ma’am,” I say.

“Would you please stop calling me ‘ma’am’?” she exclaims. “For God’s sake, Jackie, can’t you just be my fucking friend?”

I nod, but of course I can’t. Not really. It’s perfectly clear who gives the orders and who follows. Just because her orders are kind doesn’t make our relationship a friendship. We don’t need any covenant to tell us that.

She takes my other hand and places it on her left breast, so there I stand, a droopy boob in either palm.

“Do they feel the same?” she asks.

“As far as I can tell.” It’s like I’m holding them up for her. And that’s how we’re standing when she starts to cry. Almost in slow motion, her face crunches up. She bows her head, and then tears drop onto her breasts, still in my hands, and roll down onto my fingers, and I don’t know what to do, so I just hold on.

Her hair’s so billowy and thick that it hardly even moves. It lifts off her head like shrubbery. Her eyes are closed, her nose running. I can’t stop staring. She’s a sad pixie. She looks like a fairy-doll my sister once had. She puts both hands on my shoulders and starts to slap me, just lightly, slapping at my shoulders as she weeps. I can see the bones in her chest, her chest heaving. 

Why is it so hard for me to give her what she needs? 

I drop her breasts, reach around, and pull her into a hug. “It’ll be okay, Mrs. Bennett,” I tell her, though of course, I don’t know if that’s true. 

At my brother’s funeral, she read a poem she’d written. Some of the lines went like this: 

Why was it he who had to leave?
Such a nice boy
Oh, why was it Steve?

All through the rest of the service, I kept repeating those lines. For some reason, they come back to me now.

“If I have cancer,” she says, “will you take that awful goat?”

“I’ll take him even if you don’t,” I offer — because I sure can’t leave him at her house another night.

“Really?” she asks, and I nod. 

“Will you finish the shutters?” — but now she’s pushing it.

“No, ma’am,” I say. “But I’ll call around and get you some estimates.”

She burrows into my shoulder as she nods her head, and when she pulls back, my collar’s sticky. Her bra strap gets hooked around a button on my shirt and snaps when we separate. Her nose is all red from crying. She grabs some tissues and blows hard, two or three noisy times, then wipes her eyes. “Can you stay late?” she asks.

Technically, I could, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.

“No, ma’am,” I say, “but I’ll be back first thing in the morning.”  

She shakes her head quick, like a wet dog, like all her feelings are drops of water she can just shed and be done with. “My biopsy’s at eight-fifteen,” she says. “After that, we’ll burn the trash.”

“What trash?” I ask – thinking for some reason she means clotheslines, drop-cloths.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “Just the regular trash from the kitchen and bathroom. We’ll dig a little fire pit and burn it right in the front yard. The town council will love that, don’t you think?”

All through the puppet show, I try to imagine what we must look like to the children, to the puppets — sitting there on the back deck in lawn chairs on a regular old summer afternoon. Can they tell we aren’t really watching? Do they know we’re just playing our parts? When it’s over, I can’t even remember the storyline. I’ve got saffron rice and chicken in a Tupperware container warm in my lap, garlic on my fingers and traces of orange paint beneath my nails. I’ve got a goat named Nibbler stinking up the back seat of my little car and a daughter trying to keep her ponytail out of Nibbler’s mouth. She’s talking nonstop, and I’m saying “Uh-huh,” and “Really?” I’ve got a squeaky clutch that’ll need replacing soon and the first pulses of a headache. 

After dark, we sit outside in the yard, just me and my daughter. We give the dog a rawhide bone, the goat a head of cabbage, and they settled down companionably to chew. The stars, faint at first, begin to pop out like freckles, and we gaze until it’s time for bed.  

It’ll be another week before we find out for sure that Mrs. Bennett doesn’t have cancer, another month before the Bennetts leave for vacation, taking down clotheslines and dismantling fire pits before their Alaskan adventure. While they’re away, painters will redo the shutters, and life will return to what passes for normal: periodic disobedience bracketed by distractions.

But it’ll be a long while before I’m able to make peace with myself for wishing Mrs. Bennett had the very tiniest cancer — just enough to punish her for thinking she can do whatever she wants.  

Or a big cancer. The kind that might wake her up before it slaps her down for good.

My daughter and I, we watch the sky, an audience for stars, knowing that at any moment, one of them might fire across the galaxy and surrender like an ember to the blackness that has always been inside it.

It’s what happens to stars, all of them. And it’s just what they deserve, those poor bright things.

 

Sheri Reynolds is the author of seven novels (the best known: The Rapture of Canaan, thanks to Oprah’s Book Club; the most recent: The Tender Grave, published by Bywater in 2021). She’s also published a full-length play and other shorter works. Sheri teaches humanities classes at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, and returns to Cape Charles, VA, each summer, to write and float on the Chesapeake Bay. You can find more of Sheri’s work at www.sherireynolds.com