Blood-Related

They spoke with such thick accents that she sometimes couldn’t understand them, her father’s distant parents, but she clearly heard the woman say, “It can’t be yours, not blood-related, not this loud little silly girl,” and so she tried her hardest to be quieter, and tall, and levelheaded, and she tried to think of things they might want her to say. She told them about things at home, things they’d only seen in movies, like root beer and Halloween and heat, things they’d lived without their entire lives. She told them about things she liked, hoping they might like them, like reading books beneath a tree or running through the sprinklers or picking berries in the summer until her skin was stained. Then there were the other things, like waves of pink and orange fog rolling past her window, like a mountain lion walking down a spongey, fern-lined path, like jazz trailing out of her aunt’s redwood kitchen, songs she would forever link with cinnamon and apple bread and bourbon in a glass. These were things she wished to tell but had trouble describing, things they couldn’t visualize or touch, so she tried instead to hum the tune to Idle Moments, a fifteen-minute track, pressing her cold hands between the cushions of their couch to try to hide her shaking.  

The woman, hardened by her life in granite buildings with a man who turned violent whenever he was drunk, scoffed at these dreamy scenes and hurried from the room. The man,  softened by a set of lungs that would no longer let him walk three miles for a drink, grieved silently that he had never had the chance to dream such pretty things. He studied the girl’s worried eyes and curls, which looked so like the spaniel that sat outside the pub, and he could not recall the spaniel’s name but knew the smell of its brown fur: cigarettes, and coal tar soap, and rain. He smiled at this memory, and so she kept on humming because it mattered to her father,  even if she had to change to make these strangers like her, even if these strangers would only meet her once. She tried to place the jumbled notes in perfect order while staring at the clock,  counting down the hours until she could fly back home, and her father tried to think what else his daughter should have done to win over his mother, and his mother tried to drown her family out by washing pots and pans, and his father tried to make sure he would not forget this music or this little girl that he would never see again, like the spaniel at the pub, like the night he sat beside it,  petting its soft head, whispering kind things to it that he was never told.