Mercury

by Amy Jo Burns

The air around him felt thick, like honey and longing.

In the last eight years, so much of their marriage had become about power—who had it, who gave it away. A slippery, constant leveling of the scales.

Elise’s meals weren’t perfect or prepared like a spread in a Betty Crocker cookbook. But they fed. Those who gathered at her table were eager for a mouthful of heat that felt like an embrace, that dripped down a chin, that sated a longing.

It seemed impossible to imagine herself at twenty-seven. That person, whatever version of Marley she might be, was an imprint in the sand of a shoreline about

to get washed away. Still, she knew one truth would remain.

He’d collected all these Joseph family riddles—the ways each of them tried to appear other than what they were—because he was desperate for one of them to care enough to solve his own.

It struck her then, how adept he was at apologizing, how earnest, as the son of two people who didn’t know how to do it at all. He’d learned from the absence of it, how to fill that empty space with what he’d needed but never received.

Why should he receive all the mercy, all the second chances, and Elise none? The arc of a mother’s life shouldn’t have self-sacrifice as its inevitable pinnacle.

Honesty wasn’t safe, and he blamed the world for making him live as less than he was meant to be.

He had no shape to compare with his choices, a shadow box for tracing the silhouettes of what might have been.

Soldiers appeared like raindrops on the pavement because of the recruiting center just outside Chicago. Their mossy uniforms were starched and pressed, their badges neatly stitched. Elise’s father, farmer of corn and wheat and rye, often bemoaned that he’d had four daughters instead of sons. Once the draft began, and after it didn’t stop, and the cherry-faced young men who worked his fields and ate at his table didn’t return home, Mr. Jenkins never uttered those words again.