Clover by Dori Sanders

Author:Dori Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1990-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

6

An unfinished jigsaw puzzle is spread out on our dining room table. Sara Kate has arranged fresh cut flowers real pretty and placed them throughout the house. Sunlight cuts through half-closed curtains. There is the smell of food cooking, the sound of good music fills the house.

At a glance the house seems to be just a warm, ordinary household. Like the kind you see on television, a house filled with pretty things and a happy family. But after a little while what is real sweeps through, like the smell of Sara Kate’s perfume sifts from room to room.

It becomes real that there is something about our house that is not all that happy. It kind of reminds me of a thick morning fog. It’s there, you can see it, yet you can’t put your finger on it. Like the fog, a strange, uneasy feeling has filled the house, and settled down upon us.

There is just the two of us. A stepmother and child. Two people in a house. Together, yet apart. Aside from the music, the house is too quiet. We move about in separate ways. We are like peaches. Peaches picked from the same tree, but put in separate baskets.

I guess you would call me a scared little girl, all alone with a scared woman. I suppose there is nothing all that strange about a stepmama and a stepchild living alone. In our case, I guess it’s just how we happened to end up together.

People get killed every day, get stepmothers all the time. But in this case it all happened on the same day. Only minutes after my daddy married Sara Kate he was killed.

So here we are. Two strangers in a house. I think of all the things I’d like to say to her. Think of all the things I think she’d like to say to me. I do believe if we could bring ourselves to say those things it would close the wide gap between us and draw us closer together. Yet the thoughts stay in my head—stay tied up on my tongue.

Maybe my stepmother has the same fear I have, a fear of not being accepted. In a way it reminds me of a game of Monopoly.

If Sara Kate and I ever forget who we are, and sometimes we do, then we are at ease with each other and we have a pretty good little time together. Sometimes we even laugh.

Just maybe we could learn something from each other. Especially Sara Kate since she’s the one new to the house. At least she will learn that the sound that sometimes goes boom in the night is only a shutter slamming shut. All houses have their own creaky sounds.

Right now there is hardly a sound in the house. It is so very, very dry. The drought has sucked up all the wind. Just like in the poem . . . “No wind, no rain, no motion.” It’s been so hot, Mr. Barnes’ old rooster has stopped crowing.

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