They do become more real
“Your mother loved you,” Joel said.
He’d said it before, but not to this child. The words felt familiar even as everything else around him felt different. And that was before he considered Grace sitting on the couch, very demonstrably going over an inventory for the clinic, a second pen thrust through the bun at the back of her head and forgotten as she checked-off and struck-through and generally made it clear she was Not Listening.
She had a mind like a steel trap, the fiercely hinged jaws of which he now appreciated viscerally and would be able to go over every word of the imminent exchange while they lay together in bed later tonight, the bun taken down, his fingers stroking through her silky hair. The pen would sit in a mason jar in lieu of dried flowers, the only bouquet available in Jackson after the frost.
Right now, though, there was Ellie to attend to.
“You don’t have to like, butter me up about it. It’s fine, I’m fine,” Ellie said, shrugging for good measure so he would Get It. Joel wasn’t exactly sure when the women in his life had started requiring capitalized verbs in his relatively laconic internal monologue, but he wasn’t about to argue with it.
“Anyone says that’s lyin’,” he replied. It was risky, talking about lies with Ellie, given what he’d told her about what happened in Salt Lake, but he’d started to figure she didn’t always tell him the truth and the world they were in wasn’t one where the truth was critical to survival. Loyalty, kindness, a sure hand on a trigger or holding a knife would all beat out honesty and he wouldn’t find anyone who’d disagree, not even Ted at his most sentimental.
Ellie gave him a look equal parts dismissal and skepticism. Her face had filled out some since they got to Jackson, but she’d leaned into being a kid, more so after they’d moved in with Grace and had the rough shape of a family, Tommy and Maria coming over for Sunday dinner, Joel playing the guitar in front of the fire on the wet, miserable nights of late fall. She’d never had anything like it, back in the Boston QZ, growing up at the FEDRA boarding school, but he had. As Ted would likely say, this wasn’t Joel’s first rodeo.
“I used to talk to Sarah about her mother,” Joel said.
As expected, that got Ellie’s attention but unlike his older daughter, Ellie aimed for a cool slyness where Sarah had liked to pounce and then grill him for all she was worth. Grace glanced at him, a flicker in her dark eyes asking this a good idea? before she went back to the legal pad on her lap, the furrow in her brow a confirmation that they were running low on something critical that would be difficult if not impossible for them to gin up a replace for in Jackson.
“Yeah?” Ellie said. It was all she was willing to offer but he knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t let go. Tenacious, that was the word for her, she took hold and she hung on for dear life, even if she didn’t always hold her own life dear enough to his liking.
“Yeah, she was curious, even if she didn’t want to admit it. Too proud,” he said.
“Or maybe she didn’t want to bug you. Maybe she thought it’d upset you if she asked,” Ellie said. Grace smiled and then quickly frowned, as if he wouldn’t have noticed either expression. As if he hadn’t stayed alive all these years noticing everything, even if he wished he could just shut his goddamn eyes.
“Maybe,” he said. He hadn’t let himself think about it like that, not directly, but Ellie had that way about her, making him consider something like it was new or like it wouldn’t hurt unbearably. In that long ago time, when he’d worried about shitbum sub-contractors showing up for a job, sung along with his pick-up’s radio, thrown out another couple of bananas that had rotted in the fruit bowl, Sarah had made demands she knew he could meet and few others— tacos (always carnitas) on Tuesday, overly expensive sneakers, a kiss at bedtime.
“Why’d she have to ask?” Ellie said.
“Because her mother was gone,” Joel said.
“She left?”
“We lost her,” Joel said. After all this time, it was still hard to talk about, which was the most unexpected consolation, his grief impervious to the world ending and ending. “She died when Sarah was about six months old.”
“But that was Before,” Ellie said. She’d unconsciously picked up on Grace’s framing, because she would never have allowed herself to copy Grace that way, the awareness making it an affectation and her temperament and adolescence making it impossible for her to put Grace into the role of a parent, even if they all knew that’s what she’d become.
“People still died Before. There were lots of things doctors couldn’t cure or fix,” Joel said.
Ellie looked at him and then down, staring at her hands or maybe her feet in their giddily striped wool socks, he wasn’t quite sure, except that she was giving them both time. Grace too, Ellie might expect her to weigh in on what it had been like to be a doctor Before, when there were pharmacists and endless lengths of suture, pills spilling out of a bottle and down the drain an annoying inconvenience and not a death sentence. Joel knew Grace wouldn’t speak, not about hospitals and med techs and old pneumatic tube systems that were sometimes more reliable than an electronic order entered at the nurse’s station, freight elevators and vending machines filled with the sweetest, saltiest snacks, bags of saline gleaming like moonstones. She wanted to hear about Sarah and her mother and she wanted to hear Joel’s voice as he talked about them. She wanted to know Sarah’s mother’s name and what he had called her, whether they were the same.
“What did you tell Sarah about her mom?” Ellie asked, almost politely.
“How excited she was to be a mom, to be Sarah’s mom. How good she was at her job, how smart she was. Strong. How she made the best sweet potato pie I ever ate, and that’s not something to mention to Ted, he’d take it as a fuckin’ dare and he’d stop making that dried apple strudel Grace likes,” Joel said. “How she was cooler than me.”
“Cooler than you? Impossible,” Ellie replied, full of piss and vinegar as his great-aunt Rubina used to say. Face like a hatchet and a tongue to match, she’d always been that relative his parents and their siblings gave a wide berth, but she kept the cookie jar full and she saved the funnies from the newspapers for Tommy and him to read, lying on their bellies, while the grown-ups talked on the porch on hot nights.
“Sarah’s mom was impossible. Impossibly bright. Beautiful. Fucking scary when she wanted to be. When she wasn’t even trying to be,” Joel said. “She loved that girl with all her heart and I did my best, but I could never tell Sarah how much that was. How it was a goddamn travesty that she lost her mom—”
“You think it should’ve been you,” Ellie said.
He shrugged a little. There was no use arguing sometimes.
“You think she would’ve been better off with her mom, happier or safer or maybe even alive right now,” Ellie said. It hurt, but not as much as it could have, because she was looking at him as serious as death and she’d saved his life more than once. It should only ever have been his job to look after her but he’d been there after she killed the cult leader and he’d gotten her out of Salt Lake. “You’re wrong, even if she didn’t make it. You couldn’t ever be not as good at keeping someone alive.”
It was the clumsiest way he’d ever been told someone loved him, but he’d take it.
“Your mom loved you as much as Sarah’s loved her,” he said.
“You don’t know that,” she said. They’d have to talk about how they felt this way, these indirect comments, these pointless arguments, Grace a witness, a referee, the control rod in the nuclear reactor; how they cared for each other was too big for the little words there were. As long as he lived, he’d be sleeping on his deaf ear, listening for Ellie in the night.
“Yeah, I think I do,” he said.
Ellie ducked her chin down and looked up at him, her eyes bright, her expression skeptical. She wanted to be sure, of her mother and of him, because he’d pushed her away at the beginning, told her to shut up, sit down, stay put. Grace had left her the larger slice of cake or pie or the last cookie, ate the heel of the loaf when Ellie wrinkled her nose at it, shoved over whenever Ellie crowded her on the couch, told Ellie about every disgusting object she’d ever fished out of someone’s ass to Ellie’s obvious, ghoulish delight; she was sure of Grace.
“You can’t prove it,” she said. If she hadn’t been sitting down, she would have put her hands on her hips, as if he needed the emphasis.
“There’s plenty I know without being able to prove,” Joel said.
“Yeah?” Ellie said. He’d almost won her over. It would just take a little more, except he had to get it all right. The tone of his voice and his expression, how he held his hands, the length of the pause before he responded.
“Yeah.”
*
“That was an impressively succinct closing argument you made, counselor,” Grace remarked once he’d blown out the lamp on the bedside table. There was still enough moonlight to see by, though she was cast in silver now instead of gold and she was propped up on her side, the pose provocative, her ancient sweatshirt layered over a flannel nightgown more intimate than lingerie and far warmer.
“I never wanted to be a lawyer,” he said.
“Seems like there’s a lot you never wanted to be. You still get the job done, whatever it takes,” she said. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, thinking of the way Ellie had smiled when he reminded her about needing to wake up early for her work mucking out the stalls at the stable. The way she’d managed to bump into him as she walked to her bedroom, shuffling along in her sock-feet. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
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Republican Sen. Ted Cruz seems very confused about the definition of violence. In a Sunday interview, he characterized peaceful pro-choice protesters standing outside the homes of Supreme Court justices as “violent.” But when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 a “violent insurrection,” Cruz said he strongly disagreed.
Crowds of activists opposed to the Supreme Court’s voting to overturn Roe v. Wade — news that broke when someone leaked a draft opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito — have gathered outside the homes of Justice Bret Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts to voice their opposition. But reports from the scene have shown around 100 protesters marching peacefully from Kavanaugh’s home to Roberts’ home and have not reported incidents of violence.
In a Sunday interview with Maria Bartiromo, Cruz tried to paint those activists as violent. “Now they’re embracing mob violence to get their partisan outcome,” Cruz said, not of the Jan. 6 mob, but of the pro-choice protesters.
The senator went on to say that Americans are “sharply divided” on the issue of abortion. But according to a CNN poll from just a few months ago, seven in ten Americans do not want Roe v. Wade overturned.
Later in the interview, Cruz claimed without a shred of evidence that the leak came from “almost certainly one of the 12 law clerks that are clerking for the three liberal justices.” So while Cruz is opposed to people gathering outside the homes of justices, he has no problem with singling out the clerks working for justices appointed by Democratic presidents.
But it’s clear that all Cruz’s bluster is play-acting. He’s aware that these are peaceful pro-choice protests, just as he at one point knew and admitted that Jan. 6 was indeed violent, calling the events of Jan. 6 a “violent terrorist attack.” But when that truth became politically damaging, Lyin’ Ted backtracked, and insisted that there was no violence in people who fought past police lines to storm the U.S. Capitol, promising to take lawmakers lives.
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comfort tag game
got tagged by @mikhailoisbaby, right up my alley so thank you 🖤
Rules : so what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you see the following:
song: the love letter - blaqk audio
band: breathe carolina
movie: ted 2
actress / actor: edward norton and fucking adam sandler
tv show: friends
concert video: none, i think they’re mostly annoying haha
book: i haven’t read an actual book in years
author: peter pohl or mats wahl (i have no idea if their books has been translated though)
poem: none tbh
character: mickey milkovich
piece of clothing: my bf’s old sweatpants that i stole was gifted
meal: anything my mom makes
snack: baked goods like cinnamon buns
drink: water (from my emotional support water bottle, i ain’t lyin)
animal: horses
room: probably my livingroom
Tagging from my notes today (only if you wanna of course): @ianandmickeygallavich, @divine-gallavich, @creepkinginc, @vintagelacerosette, @imsorry-imlate , @movelikeyoustoleit, @jomilky, @chicanomick,
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