It wasn’t the accident that had finally ended yoga classes for Sheryl.  No, she had quit when Meg was born, after slogging her burgeoning self through autumn rain and winter slush to prenatal yoga.  Although Larry faithfully drove her to class each week, he dropped her off declaring time was better spent than “curling into pretzel shapes with tree-huggers and hippy types.”  But she was the one who chose to stop going – caring for Meg soon eliminated all but wisps of free time.  Now though, Sheryl had all the time she wanted, yet not even the most experienced yogi could propel severed nerves into action.  So her co-op friends in full lotus pose lined only the recesses of her memory, recalled today because the girl was here.  She was the type of person who did yoga. 

            “Okay, that’s like way too much butter!”  A raised, female voice came from the kitchen off the living room where Sheryl sat, startling her out of the reverie. 

            “Hey, my mom says the secret to great grilled cheese is using a lot more butter than you’re comfortable with.”  Her son’s voice was ambling and low, teasing.   The only boy, her surprise child, born after the accident.   

            “Well, I feel my arteries clogging already.”  The girl again.  Sheryl shifted in the chair and wheeled closer to the kitchen door, cracked slightly ajar. 

            It had been some time since there was another girl in the house.  Meg was ten years older than Mark, who was now finishing his senior year of high school.  Her daughter had moved out before her graduation, on a quiet Sunday morning in April.  When Meg hugged her good-bye, duffel bags in tow, boyfriend honking in the driveway, Sheryl swallowed the metallic taste of blood, as she bit back memories of her baby daughter, fifteen years younger on Easter morning, frothed in lace, with a chocolate smeared smile.  Her husband sat beside her, the Christian Science Monitor blocking his face, as his daughter threw him a mocking salute before dragging her bags through the doorway.  Sheryl wished she could have helped her carry them to the car.  The night before, Larry had caught Meg and her boyfriend in the back of the rusting Sedan he loaned her for the night and told her to be out by church the next morning.  Sheryl tried to talk him out of it, but Larry preferred to push the kids away since he was never too good at holding them close.  And it was hard to argue with a man when you were locked two feet below him.  Not to mention that he’d be the one to help you in the bath that night. 

             “Hey, mom.”  Sheryl looked up to see her son standing in the doorway, half a person taller than her.  She remembered when he barely reached her chin sitting on her lap.  It was impossible for her to maneuver him in or out of the crib and playpen, so he spent the first two years of his life in her arms until the girls came home from school.  A momma’s boy by necessity.

            “Yes, Mark?” 

            “Want some grilled cheese?” 

Sheryl’s eyes flickered to the girl behind him, hanging back in the doorway to the kitchen.  Mark called her Beth, but the A Honor Roll listed in the paper each semester always printed her full name, Elisabeth, spelled the Scandinavian way with an s, not a z.

            “Sure.  Remember to change the oil on the car before your dad gets back.” 

Mark’s jaw tightened and, for a second, his hands curled into fists.  Sheryl stared straight at her son, while Beth busied herself reading a newspaper article on the coffee table.  Seconds later, his shoulders relaxed and his long legs, endless in dark denim, crossed the room in five paces before he exited through the garage door, leaving them in silence. 

            As usual, Sheryl waited to see if the girl would speak first, but Beth continued to read the article.  It discussed differences in sweat patterns between men and women, and she had carefully cut it out of the New York Times for Mark to read.  When alone in the house, Sheryl mostly passed the time reading; she read novels at night but newspapers and magazines during the day, collecting bits of information that would be useful in making small talk at cocktail parties.  If she went to cocktail parties, that is. 

            “Do you do any cooking with your mom?” 

            “Um, a little.  I like baking better, though.”  Beth smiled in the affable but closed way reserved for acquaintances who ask too many questions. 

            Sheryl suddenly remembered the curlers still embedded in her thick, steel grey hair and wondered if the girl was embarrassed for her.  She didn’t wear make-up anymore and, when left down, her hair usually stuck up in the back from the static produced by rubbing against her chair.  But with all that she had lost the day of the accident, she had gained a few things: one check for $628,728.39 from Toyota, twenty pounds across her waist, a droopy right eyelid, and freedom from caring about wearing curlers in front of company. 

            “Well, it’s a good day for grilled cheese,” she said, turning from Beth, whose gaze had settled on a cluster of dust bunnies in a corner, one of several wordless testimonies to the unkempt house.  She felt an unexpected and frightening desire to slap the girl – not to hurt her but to distract her from judgment of their home, of her husband, of Sheryl.  But wheelchair-bound or not, Sheryl always preferred words to actions, and Mark had said that Beth would be attending one of those small, quietly pretentious liberal arts colleges on the east coast next fall.  She’d start there. 

            “Congratulations on your early acceptance for next year.  You certainly deserve it – Mark says you study a lot.  Guess that doesn’t leave much time for fun besides going out with him.”

            Beth stared at her for a second before responding.

            “Well, yeah.  I do work a lot.  But I read, too.  Things besides textbooks, I mean.  I read for fun a lot.”

            Sheryl inwardly reveled at the girl’s sudden discombobulation. 

            “Oh – do you like all those chick lit novels that the young girls read these days?”

            But Beth had apparently recovered after her momentary disorientation at Sheryl’s sudden antagonism.

            “No, actually most of the books I’ve read are the classics.  My mom was really strict about what books I could read growing up, but she always approved of Dickens and Austen.  Emily Bronte is my favorite author.”

            “She only wrote one book.”

            “You only need one when it’s Wuthering Heights.” 

            And then it was Sheryl who couldn’t find her words.  The girl seemed more like her than Mark or Meg would ever be.  As she looked out the window, heavy icicles replaced dying leaves on their sole tree, and she imagined a cozy winter night around Christmastime.  Mark and his father would be arguing over who would heat the car up before going out to dinner, while Meg and her husband tried to cool the inflaming tempers.  But she and Beth, oblivious or indifferent to those around them, would decide whether it was Fanny Price or Edmund Bertram who ruined Mansfield Park.  Sheryl was about to tell Beth how she preferred Wuthering Heights to Jane Eyre when the garage door slammed open and Mark reentered, wiping his greasy hands with a paper towel.

            “When’s Dad coming home?”  He asked, tossing the towel in the trash bin.

            “Around five,” she replied, as they disappeared once again behind the half-cracked kitchen door.  When’s Dad coming home?  How old was Mark the last time he asked that question with excitement?  Six?  Maybe five?  Yes, five, because Hardee’s closed just before his sixth birthday, and it was at that half-hearted fast food chain where one of the barely pubescent boys behind the counter had put three instead of four chicken nuggets in a carton destined for her husband’s tray.  Larry stood at the front of the store, raised the carton high above his head, and shouted, “Who here doesn’t know how to count?”  Meg huddled by the exit, ready to escape, while her son stood next to her, his head just reaching the tops of her wheels, mouth open, eyes wide.

            Did that explain this girl’s reserve?  The forced smile, shifted eyes, and sparse words?  Had Mark laid out all of his dad’s tirades and mother’s timidity in the uncensored honesty of first love?  And so this girl shrank from her, refusing to pierce further into their frayed family by befriending the broken mother.  But Sheryl feared, and sometimes admitted, that despite the closeness between mother and son, the genetic lottery had dealt him his father’s sullen moods and quick temper.  Just last Saturday, Mark had spent the entire day locked in his room (Beth was out of town visiting her grandparents) and had answered her fifth call for dinner with a fist-sized hole in his bedroom ceiling.  

            Now though, it was only laughter that wafted from the kitchen along with the scent of grilling butter and melting cheese.  The Sheryl from an alternate reality in which car parts did not malfunction or stem cells replaced shattered nerves casually walked through the kitchen door to catch the last of the joke, grabbed a soda from the highest shelf of the fridge, and left as swiftly and gracefully as she entered.  There would be no slow ride to the door, bumpy roll over the uneven transition from carpet to laminate, or awkward turn before a reeling exit. 

            The quiet murmur of voices punctuated by exclamation points of laughter ended.  As silence slowly engulfed the house, Sheryl wondered if they were stealing a kiss in front of the sizzling sandwiches, concealed by the kitchen door and guarded by the whir of wheels that would warn in advance of an intruder’s approach.

            A clatter of dishes being unloaded from the dishwasher broke the quiet.  Thank goodness for the dishwasher, the only kitchen appliance accessible to her, so while the living room carpet was a collage of stains and twenty years of toothpaste splatter decorated the bathroom mirror, at least her dishes were pristine. 

            “It’s ready,” her son called from the kitchen.  She wheeled slowly through the doorway to the kitchen table and accepted a plate from Mark.

            “Did you invite Beth to the movies with us tonight?” 

            “Not yet,” Mark responded and turned to Beth, “Want to go?”    

            “Oh.”  A pause.  “Well, actually, I have some work to get done at home.”

            “But you said you have everything done for tomorrow?”

            “Yeah, I mean, I should probably get ahead, you know.”

It might be true – there was that A Honor Roll and the college out east.  But Sheryl also suspected that Beth simply did not want to spend the night with her boyfriend’s shattered mother and crippling father.

As she crunched into her sandwich, bread crumbs and hot cheese coating her throat and pooling in her stomach, all taste of butter and bread and Velveeta suddenly receded and a sudden precipitation of sadness overcame her.  She had been this girl once.  The smart girl who did yoga and read the Brontes and avoided butter and tried to look pretty.  But now, this girl didn’t want to know her.  And this girl, the girl who was Going Places, would be taking Mark away without a thought for Sheryl, left to rot in a quiet house with a pile of newspaper stories and no one to show them to. 

Sheryl watched as Mark’s hand reached for Beth’s under the table and saw her draw it away, the girl’s eyes now purposefully intent upon her sandwich, while Mark’s nostrils flared at the small rebuff. 

Maybe she had been wrong.  Maybe Beth would leave Mark here with Sheryl after all.  Her son with the middling grades, average looks, and flickering temper.  Did Beth know?  Know that Mark was Larry, that Beth was Sheryl, that whether at a height of four feet or six, she would not be squirming at Hardee’s ten years from now.  No, Sheryl wanted to shout, no, please take him from here.  You could be different; he could be different.

But she suspected that not before long it would be just her and Mark.  Her and Mark and grilled cheese with a lot of butter.  Sheryl told herself that this would do, that Mark could get by without her, that they could get by without her.  She tried to smile until the wall clock ticked loudly in the quiet room, and she looked up to see that soon Larry would be home.  And then Mark would be gone, along with the grilled cheese.