Mulch by Ann Ripley

brandished her stick like a sword and leaped forward at an invisible foe and warned: “En garde!” Then, dropping her pose, she sauntered on. Maybe she would fill out like her sister, Martha, and then people would notice her more. Dogs might even bark at her.
    Janie noticed that some houses had little additions, some had great big additions, while others had separate buildings similar to the one at her house. Her mother was now using this addition as her writing studio, which meant Janie rarely could entertain friends there any more. Instead she had to bring them into her bedroom, which wasn’t nearly as cool. This had all happened after her mom talked with Nora, Melanie’s mother. Although Janie liked Nora (“Call me Nora, Jane, and I’ll call you Jane,” she had said in that low voice of hers) she noticed that Nora was another housewife who didn’t go to work. She wrote poetry, and Melanie said her mother got paid for it, too, but not even minimum wage if one counted up all the time it took. And now Nora had influenced her mother not to work but write instead, which was a little embarrassing, because Janie worried that her mother would never get published. So that left two of the women in the cul-de-sac as housewives who wrote, which was kind of funky. Secretly, it’s what Janie could see herself doing when she was married. Secretly, she would like to be a Shakespeare or at least an Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
    But the rest of the mothers had jobs with real salaries, like Mrs. Mougey, who was becoming a kind of friend of Janie’s. She raised money to help needy children in the world, and probably earned lots of money, which always meant the family could more easily pay for things like college. She thought that type of job would make you feel good about yourself, although it was giving
Mrs. Mougey
more gray hair. She worked so hard, coming home late almost every night, leaving her husband alone all the time in the evening. Janie had a perfect view of their house out of her bedroom window.
    She was torn. If only she didn’t have to worry about money. Then she felt guilty: She was well aware of the homeless when the family drove through Washington. They made her ashamed to drive by, a passenger in a big, new car, wearing clean, new clothes. She knew her family would never suffer like that, and wondered how God figured out what was fair for people.
    She saw the outlines of a big tree ahead. This was where the trail curved sharply up. Here she had a good view of one of those outbuildings, with a man working inside. A saw whined faintly. Janie scrambled up the small incline for a closer look, the leaves crunching like cornflakes. She crossed the yard. The man, who seemed very large, slowly moved his body with the saw, with an occasional forward thrust as if he had hit an easier spot in the wood. The saw’s whine rose to a higher pitch when he hit those easier spots. Her father always talked longingly of having a saw so he could make his own furniture, but she knew somehow that this was just talk. Her dad was more of a reader than a carpenter. She came a few steps closer, then realized the saw had been turned off. Had he heard her? She froze. Hewas right there on the other side of the glass, blond, with thick glasses, wearing jeans and a big plaid lumberjack shirt like one her dad wore. In his hand was some kind of a planing tool, which he grasped like a weapon. He slowly turned around and stared at her, his eyes blue and dangerous.
    She was visible! He could see her blond hair, her blue eyes, her skinniness, her jeans jacket, her tan Levi’s, her dirty tennis shoes … he could see it all, she was sure. If only she had been a brunette, he wouldn’t have been able to see her! Dropping her stick in terror, she turned and stumbled out of the yard, tripped and sprawled down the shallow incline, and landed in the path.
    She pulled herself up to a sitting position. “Oooh,” she groaned, and gently touched her face. Then