Fruiting Bodies: Stories

by Kathryn Harlan

She knows that Elaine and Dad sat up all night, after she fell asleep, that they drank coffee and beer, that Dad took a cigarette from her even though he doesn’t smoke because he liked the sinewy lines of her arms, and thought about asking her to dinner and how he didn’t have any place to ask her. And she knows that Elaine would have said no, though she would have said it nicely, and that Dad didn’t ask anyway, because when he told Elaine that just one person could taste the fat, she shrugged one of her sharp shoulders and said, “I guess I know a thing or two more than I ever needed to anyway.” Dad liked her less after that, he liked her a lot less. And Dorothy knows why that is, because she looked so certain while she said it, the light glancing off the hard edges of her eyes. Dad has never known what to do with people who are anything but discontented in the boundaries of their lives. She knows that Elaine would have said no because she’s discovered she likes to be alone more than she likes to be not alone, and that she discovered that after she caught her husband with his brother’s wife in her shower, but she got the farm out of it so she could mind more than she does.