Jack and Jill get a Mortgage

by Helen R. Peterson

When the hurricane came through, knocking out the power and mowing trees down like roadkill across the driveway, we brewed our tea anyway. The kettle sat on the grill, its bottom browned, beside sausage patties cut thick, pancakes bubbling in the griddle. Breakfast slowed from a trot to a lazy caper, there was nowhere to go and no gas to get there anyway. Hands wrapped around heavy restaurantware cups would get cramped in the position. We had so many of those cups, stolen from Denny's, Waffle House, IHOP, wherever the food was cheap and the waitresses too busy flirting with the next round of truckers to notice a dish or two slipped into a knapsack.

I look at you, the scruff building up on your cheeks, and I see the kid you once were, tramping around the country, my hand in yours. Not caring whether the cups would be counted, if that waitress, her knees buckled under the weight of trying to feed three kids on tips, might be held responsible for the loss. Summers spent climbing mountains, living in abandoned hunters' cabins, collecting wild morels and sassafras to sell at the local farmer's market when the cash got thin. "There are no hills that can hold us down," you'd say, the sun glimmering off your crown and I would swoon at the depth of your juvenile philosophy.

Now though, you stand up, dump your cup in the pail of water I've fetched from FEMA, and walk away, leaving me to rub the dishes down with vinegar and brown paper.

Helen R. Peterson, from Canterbury Connecticut, writes poetry and fiction and is coeditor of The Waterhouse Review. She is currently awaiting publication of Melons and Memory, her first full length book of poetry, which will be published in early December from Little Red Tree Press. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications, both nationally and abroad, and has in the past year read at the Bowery Poetry Club and the Out of the Blue Gallery in Cambridge.