Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page B

perspective.”
    “I keep thinking if I just did things differently, handled Ezra differently, then we wouldn’t argue.”
    She shook her head. “I remember a day when my mother and I took tea and scones out to my father. He was working on a well near that stand of cottonwood, yet another site where he said he was going to build a house for my mother. As he climbed out of that hole to have his lunch he was grey and shaky, but he wouldn’t stop digging. ‘You need to rest,’ my mother told him, just like you told Ezra he needed rest just now. That’s all she said. But he yelled at her. ‘You just don’t want me to finish,’ he said. ‘You want me to look bad in front of the neighbours, so it proves what you’ve been saying about me all along, that I’ll never build this house. You think I’m useless.’ It was a thing she would never say, of course, even if she thought it. As I picked wildflowers in the grasses next to her, she reassured him that yes, she knew he’d finish the house, that yes, she loved him for it, using the tone of voice a mother uses when her child has an upset.”
    As she told this story, I saw my grandparents in my mind’s eye, as if from a distance, their hands gesturing in argument. My grandfather’s hands were clenched mountain cliffs, and my grandmother’s were at first trees, outspread, imploring, and then two trays, palms open as if serving a way forward. My grandfather took both her hands in his, and it was within those prayerful hands that the whole of my own future was contained.Those hands as rough as wood, the desperation with which they clung to her, a drowning man’s.
    “What was wrong with him?” I asked.
    She didn’t say anything for a time and then, “There were a lot of things wrong.”
    “Daddy!” Jeremy called out and we both turned.
    Ezra stood between bins heaped with green peppers and bananas, caught at an intersection where a man was filling a water jug from a dispenser. The man blocked the aisle to the dairy section, causing a traffic jam, and my husband, stalled by indecision, was unable to navigate his cart through those other shoppers. Women with children in their buggies and old men with baskets over their arms passed him. I lifted Jeremy onto my hip, to leave the cart with my mother, and slipped through the congestion to come up behind Ezra. “Why don’t you just go?” I asked.
    “Go, go, go!” Jeremy said.
    “I’m waiting for the passengers to scurry out of my way.”
    “You’ll wait forever. Just say
Excuse me,
then step out in front of someone.” I demonstrated with Jeremy in my arms. But Ezra didn’t follow; he stood where he was, watching the other shoppers march by. Bombarded and confused by the terrific business of the store, he turned his head to every sound. I felt my irritation slip into resignation, and I took the lead, as I did every day in the dance that was our lives. I put Jeremy in Ezra’s cart and headed through the store with Ezra following behind. “How about you sit on the bench by the door with your cart while we finish shopping?” I said, knowing that he wouldn’t argue now, and he didn’t. He shuffled beside Jeremy and me like a dutiful sentry through the maze of carts, shoppers, and grocery displays, to the bench by the door.
    MY MOTHER WAS IN THE pet-food aisle when I found her, instructing a pimpled young man on which flat of cat food to take down from the shelf. The clerk set the flat under the shopping cart and reached for another. “You must have a lot of cats,” he said.
    “Five,” said my mother. Not exactly the truth of the matter; more than a dozen had greeted me that morning when I stepped outside.
    I smiled to allow the clerk to leave. “You have quite a bit of cat food at home already, Mom.” Her cupboards were full of the stuff.
    “I’m just stocking up. It was on sale.”
    “Why don’t we pick out some fruit for Dad and head home? I think we’re all getting tired.”
    I hooked my mother’s