fiction
Thursday An excerpt from the novel Olive Me. By MAureen FOley C
herimoyas, eucalyptus honey, avocados, organic strawberries, meyer lemons. the words and scents have a soothing effect.
The smell of fresh basil from Belvedere
Farms picked up half a block away. We watch Olive and her mother, Lucy Juice, walk the closed off Linden Avenue block of the Carpinteria Farmers Market. Arugula, baby greens, lemon-chili pistachios. But it’s the flowers that hold them.
Lucy Juice never says much. Left Olive to
guess at her past lives, the time she spent with her dad when they lived on a goat farm outside of Davis, in northern California. The 70s. Even though her daughter’s husband, Lee, is missing, potentially dead, Lucy keeps quiet. Shows up with food around dinner time or weeds the garden without being asked. Small things. Truffles on the doorstep. Twenty bucks tucked into the mailbox. The Ghia magically filled with gas. Things Olive would never ask for. Inconsequential, infinitely thoughtful. How love shows up unexpectedly. Lucy Juice has an endless imagination for
new kindness. Standing admiring the wire-tied bouquets of sunflowers at the farmer’s table, the two women share the same profile, give or take twenty years. But that’s where the body clone ends. Olive stands a good three inches
taller than her mother. Olive’s long black hair, her mother’s frizzy red. Olive lean and boy-like, her mother shapely, breasts and all. Three years ago they could barely talk. In a
way, Lee made them break through. From him, Olive learned to receive, to talk to someone without words, to speak without assaulting. And she learned her mother’s silences, how the body speaks volumes. What is implied, intended, said without. Olive is eating a free sample of a honey
tangerine, the juice curling off her chin, and spitting seeds onto the asphalt. Watching her mother choose elegant stalks of periwinkle del- phiniums from the Dutch flower growers, when she starts crying. Bawling really. Feels the punch in her stomach, rising to a pinch in her throat. And behind her retro sunglasses, the tears leaking out. Something about the last strokes of sunlight hitting her mother’s glasses pushed back on her head, the graying red hair, her mother’s careful attention on each stem, loving. Temporary. Pa-rents. Rents. Because they’re
rental units, used for a short time, then gone. Gone without a trace. Finally leaving her alone.
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