The Distance Between Flowerpots
Kimi K2 (0711) and Llama 405b
The key didn't fit anymore. She stood on the porch in her mother's coat—the one with the torn pocket where she used to hide cough drops—holding the brass house key that had warmed against her palm during the entire drive here. The lock had been changed, but the spare flowerpot with its hairline crack still sat exactly three inches to the left of the welcome mat, as if her mother might appear at any moment to adjust it back to center. Why did she have this one vivid, useless memory of her mother shaking her head at the ill-placed mat, bending over the pot and moving it a mere three inches? Valerie's own knees ached to kneel like she still had the teenage body that used to live here and move the flowerpot for once.
Valerie crossed her arms on the reinforced window over the lock, the weight of granite and her recent beer weight pressing into her elbows. She peered into the foyer. Shadows layered the space in an ashy film. It held the echo of her mother's voice.
Valerie, shut off that lamp, we're in the foyer.
Help Mom with this grocery bag from the car, Valerie.
Valerie, grab the mail from the foyer table before you walk out the door again.
What happened to the entryway rug she'd once tripped over, nearly cracking her front tooth? Her parents had eventually replaced it, playfully referring to it as “Her Tooth” rug. Valerie peeked closer through the window, daring her memories to flicker to life. On the foyer table sat an L.L. Bean catalog, an expensive-looking vase holding a bushel of flowers the color of some animated movie's sunset, and two candles crawling with painted vines. This was not her mom's foyer; it couldn't be her foyer. You don't say “her foyer” in a building she didn't want to be in the first place, one she'd inherited from a father she'd shunned. Her mother was never present in that home, that enormous cold place she hadn't chosen to buy, barely designed, named.
The house fought back against Valerie, even in her own memory. The foyer was too muted, swathed in predictably neutral colors. But maybe it was decorated just how her mother had wanted. Nothing was as Vivienne made it seem. Who could be an objective witness to one's own mother? Valerie remembered Vivienne coming home with a run in her pantyhose and patching the thread with clear nail polish, then drawing a circle around the tea-colored stain as she muttered something about “let them get their damned beige shag.” Her mother had gotten the last word, hadn't she? Several weeks after her funeral the floors had been stripped bare.
Valerie imagined her mother's lingering energy would greet her at the door, take her coat or offer her a cup of tea. But these were manners her mother had never had the time to perform. Nor I, Valerie thought. And maybe I'm glad I don't have to. Yet, she could still feel Vivienne curving through the air, on the other side of the brass knob. Was that feeling real? Or all in Valerie's head? Maybe her mother wasn't anywhere in the world. She died, wasn't that enough?
Valerie rattled the knob, shouted, pressed her face to the streaked glass window next to the door. Her breath left a moist rectangle. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness filling the foyer. Its cold crept through her bones despite the mock fire in her chest, her cheeks, and her puffing plumes of breath. It smelled like mildew, early rain, the sweet musk of clumped wet leaves.
Night hummed in the back of Valerie's throat, a hollow gripe. She hated how nothing about the estate felt like trespassing, though it had become some other family's lawn now. Like a friend you loved who changed outfits and perfume, whose voice you no longer recognized, whose punk rock albums had become show tune soundtracks, and you were supposed to pretend it never happened, the last time you spoke, that she was still the same when she was so noticeably the opposite of herself.
Valerie thrashed through the patio's bushes until she found the right window: her very old bedroom. Rain collected around the frames, but the windowsill beans she'd planted had sprouted into vines and crisscrossed to shade the glass. The green turf had morning glory shoots wearing white-teethed flowers. Why shouldn't rained-in seeds thrive in her absence? What did it matter when her room was empty of all humans?
But it wasn't empty. A tall boy sat on her old bed, his thin white feet planted on a carpet the girl Valerie once was had walked barefoot over every night to get to the light switch near the closet. Her father always insisted on the blinds being open; he'd forced them onto her, and now someone else had the burden of opening, closing, dusting those blinds. The boy's hands flopped by his sides. Her eyes adjusted to the shadows glancing off his lap, a dark mass without detail.
Valerie tapped the glass and his face appeared over the window latch. His eyes hooked into hers, the glass between them wobbling on loose grooves. Neither of them moved as their breath shared the pane, fogging and fading.
What are you holding? Valerie stilled her fist from rapping on the glass. Because it wasn't simply his hands, resting on his lap. It was something much more solid, like a book. She whispered to herself, not sure she even wanted the answer: What did you bury under that petal pile?
Spencer Morgan pressed his forehead against the clear plane between himself and the soaked woman. His hands stuck out from the bundle he held; his fingers spread the rain streaking over her face. Why? This wasn't his window. Or her house. There was a pocketknife in the bundle, wrapped in muslin cloth, his favorite comic strip folded between the pages of an old Lenscrafters book. The woman's shoulders heaved against the pane. Her coat was soaking into her skin. Spencer thought she might break the window, burst into the room running. Something in her begged him to appease her, explain. His only tool was a smile, so he sent one through the window.
She pulled back. So did he.
Valerie wanted to welcome him. What was she even doing here? Holding her mother for ransom too?
The boy scowled and the curtains shut with a long slur of the rod. She’d lost him, failed. Would that boy ever open the blinds again, see her face in the glass?
Valerie dropped to the ground, her back against the house. The drainage pipe overhead shaded her as she pulled the coat close. It stayed too dark to see even the outline of building, so she might as well lean against a cold something—better than nothing like the slate maze at the east end of the property. At least under the attic window, the one with no past, she could sense another unrooted life.
The boy cowered in the room above. She felt him there. They sat, together, two uncomfortable ferry passengers who knew everything they needed to know about each other without using words. Valerie leaned back and rolled her spine along the brick wall, drowsy and warm and sure there was no more good to do. This part of the wall held nothing. No shrubs or flowerpot. Maybe the rain could wash that slate clean.
Spencer planted his thumbnail in the corner of the window and lifted the blinds, impatient for them to give all at once. The woman still shielded her face with her arm. Rain had turned her hair into a wet pile on one shoulder. The longer she sat on the ground, the more Spencer felt this woman needed the book.
When the woman stood her trench coat fell limp, intentional folds that no longer bulged with a curving weight at her chest, folds he'd once shared with a girl before the girl had become a folded memory he'd shut up.
He knew he had to give this thing, this modest book, away, or else it might get lost. He peeled the tape left over from before, and then he cracked the door so that opening it would only be a matter of turning the knob. He tucked the book under his arm, reached for the chain lock, and waited for her to see him.
Valerie saw the book in his hands. She lurched as if out of sleep, not sure she could continue sitting in deluge or wait any longer for him to appear again. Then the front door opened.
He didn't meet her eyes, but that book—so familiar—had the worn, musty smell of Valerie's old room.
Valerie accepted the book because he insisted. She gripped its spine so one half fell open. He looked somewhere just above her head. Then he was gone.
Valerie turned to the house, mouths full of the words to open the space, but they came out wrong, indiscernible, and she thought just as wrong as what she had done. He needs this more than me. She staggered to the edge of the lawn and fumbled for the vicinage stone, the old property marker in disrepair. Valerie used this ledge to wedge the book open to the only handwritten page it contained, and turned back to the house.
They were the exact words Valerie wanted to say to the new family, the stones, to herself.
She traced the letters with her index finger. Letters written down make everything real. Then she stepped away from the book.
Spencer shut out the rain dripping into his socks at the front door.
He could hear Mrs. Monroe establishing a negative harmony against his mother's wild soprano wheeze as he climbed the stairs to his room.
“Your son is too old to be outside playing in this weather! Don't you care what the boy brings in on his shoes? It's my estate, not a carport. You can't just leave trash where you please!” Mrs. Monroe slammed the cellar door.
Spencer padded back across the room to the coat rack. He slid his hand into his mother's red jacket that smelled like his mother and like somebody else.
In the front pocket he found a square sheet of paper, folded: two rows of capital letter font.
Hand◆ About the ending
❧ About the title