Chase Banter [02] Marching to a Different Accordion by Saxon Bennett

cockroaches was ensconced in a flower-covered world of paper. Bud looked up triumphantly. “Yurt!” She held out her hand for the boy to shake and then went back to her yoga mat.
    Chase clapped her hands and then plucked Bud up in her arms. “You said a word, a real honest-to-God word. Your first-spoken-in-the-company-of-others word in real English.”
    The suburban woman who’d commented on Bud’s uncanny ability concerning yoga was perplexed. “Her first word was yurt?”
    The woman with the dimples, who had introduced herself as Lou when they exchanged names, laughed. “Considering the occasion I’d be proud. She just captured a rogue invader using a policy of containment rather than destruction.”
    Paul knelt down and smiled at Bud and her new friend Peter. “Good work.” Chase liked it when grown-ups got on a kid’s level. It was the height of politesse, like getting up when an elderly person needed your seat on a train or a bus. Her own polite behavior had only been thwarted once. When waiting in the doctor’s office for Gitana, she had attempted to help an elderly man get up out of his chair. It seemed the thing to do at the time, but she had underestimated his girth and while trying to help him up she’d ended up in his lap. He didn’t seem to mind having a pretty blond woman there but his wife did.
     The women resumed their yoga positions with wary eyes turned toward the paper cups and their unwilling occupants. Only during the short session of meditation was their vigilance forced to a stop. Chase thought meditation was kind of silly for a room full of kids until she discovered that meditation worked like a drug on tired children. Bud curled up next to her while Paul made soothing conversation to get them in the zone and then silence ensued. Chase tried to quiet her mind, only to discover that it refused to be still. Her thoughts had become a cat’s cradle of conflicting ideas—like two actors on a stage doing a monologue at the same time.
    “We’re supposed to be concentrating on being completely empty,” she told her mind.
    “Like that’s ever going to happen. Let’s use this time to work out that scene at the warehouse you’ve got coming up,” her mind replied.
    “That’s not what meditation is supposed to be like. It’s a time of no thinking, a blue space where I can find peace and harmony—a oneness with the universe.”
    “That’s bullshit. If you don’t want to think about the book, then let’s think about sex.”
    Sex was a topic that had been popping up a lot more lately. Since Bud’s arrival her and Gitana’s sex life wasn’t what it used to be. Chase, having never been the instigator, had depended on Gitana to keep the hearth fires warm. Now, it seemed, they were so busy and seldom alone except at the end of a hectic day that making love or rather making time for love had gotten bottom-shelved. Listening to Delia’s and Bo’s erotic short stories had made her think about sex. And now in the middle of a roomful of mothers and children she was thinking about it again instead of clearing her mind. It was horrid and she couldn’t have been more relieved when the whole thing came to an end.
    After class, Lou and Peter came over. Bud and Peter then went to help Paul slip pieces of the flyer for the yoga class under the paper cups so they could relocate the cockroaches. Paul had them put the nasty creatures into a plastic bag, telling them he would take them someplace nice where they could make a new home.
    “Do you really think he means that? We had a dog once that had taken to killing cats and my father told us he took him to a nice farm where he would be happy. Come to find out much later, he’d taken him to the pound,” Lou said.
    Chase thought about this for a moment. She put Japanese beetles into gallon-sized clear plastic bags and baked them in the sun to kill them after she’d meticulously picked them from her spinach and lettuce before they had the chance to