May

Four Seasons is such a wonderfully quiet project, here but once a month slowly building to something extremely special at the end of this year. If you have already subscribed to the free stories once per month, thank you. If not, you can to it at the end of this excerpt.

David Wright has now joined the project and made it even awesomer.

Enjoy:

“I’m not eating her egg rolls, and I don’t care if they’ve gone from honorable to third place at the Strawberry Festival – they’re still filthy,” Brian barely muttered the last fragment under his breath as he waved the red Grand Am in front of him. “And they’re barely even egg rolls.”

“You don’t have to eat the egg rolls. I already told her you’re lactose intolerant.”  Maya put her hand on Brian’s knee as he relaxed into the rhythm of the newly merged freeway, and then added, “Just be nice.”

“I’m always nice,” he said.

“I know,” Maya agreed exactly as much out loud as she did in her head, “but today you have to be Mother’s Day nice.”

“Mother’s Day nice? She hasn’t so mush as wished me a happy birthday in the six years we’ve been together.”

“She doesn’t mean anything by it.”

Brian could have said, “Of course you feel that way. She’s your mother,” but he didn’t see it filling the air any differently than the approximately 4,738 times he’d already said it before. Maya was well aware of every one of her mother’s million and one faults, and could probably write them backwards in Greek if she were ever to slip into some sort of talking-in-tongues dementia. But it was her mother, and Maya’s responses were well oiled; immediate instinct being to dim the indisputable defects of her mom while shining a light on Brian’s own melodrama.

Brian stared at the road, trying to read the license plate three cars in front of him while Maya fiddled with the stations. Jasmine cried from the back seat, suddenly awake and sure to be hungry. She’d managed to stay asleep from cradle to car seat, as well as the last two hours nestled in the freeway’s lullaby.

The sudden cry split the moment and Maya started digging through the diaper bag in search of a bottle. Brian tried not to sigh. Maya’s mother, Olivia, was a royal pain in the ass and though already plenty tolerant of her bullshit, he’d be a lot more able to swallow it all with a smile if she could at the very least admit it.

Olivia’s husband left her 10 years earlier and she’d been drowning deeper in delusion with each passing year. At first, Olivia believed (despite the absurdity), that she and the old man were meant for one another. Once she realized he was a dirty scum bag who thought cheating was fine as long as you’re breathing, she started to believe it was she and Maya vs. the world and any man walking it.

Brian was sure Maya defended him whenever one of the arrows was especially sharp or unnecessary and he himself wasn’t around to deflect it, but both knew that if she spent her time defending everything, there would never be breath between monologues.

It was always easier to simply agree.

“You can never count on a man,” Olivia would say. Maya would offer a “Brian’s never let me down before” or a “You can’t generalize everything, Mom,” but her protests were never met by anything more than a dismissive whistle or abrupt change of subject.

Brian took a half glance behind him and crossed four lanes, drifting toward the exit with the kind of fluid sweep only possible in and around LA on a Sunday. The car was still silent, save for the barely audible backbeat of an old and almost forgotten one hit wonder that only Maya could ever remember the name to, and the sound of Jasmine drinking her bah-bah in the car seat behind them.

The subject of family was best not brought up, like student loans or bachelor parties. Mostly, it was a subject that had already been stripped of all its nutrients. All that was left was a syrup fit for moonshine.  The subject would surface, they would each say slightly more than they should and far less than they meant, and then let awkward silence fill the space between them while counting the long seconds until it was safe to fill the air again.

The baby made everything easier.

“She’s so beautiful,” Brian said, removing his two o’clock from the steering wheel and adjusting the rear view mirror to gain a better look at the pursed lips and focused eyes of the beautiful baby in the back seat suckling on her bottle. His cheeks spread and the smile instantly defrosted his face. Maya absorbed the warmth.

“So do you think mom will be up or down today?” she asked.

“We referring to mood or weight?”

“Is there a difference?” Maya laughed a littler harder than needed and Brian joined her as he pulled a left onto her mother’s tiny cul de sac…

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