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“It’s not too late,” Lupe said. She brought her cigarette out of her mouth and tapped it on the chilled, rusted side of the truck. Her exhale was more parts condensation than smoke. “We can still run.”
Jess shut the driver’s side door. The sound clapped over the flat, bare ground and the thin, patchy layer of snow that covered it. She squinted at her across the hood. “That what you wanna do?”
Lupe hesitated. She pursed her lips, frowning at where the grey sky met the horizon. “Nah.”
“You sure?”
She nodded.
“Lu.”
Lupe looked back, meeting Jess’s eyes. There was a steady question in them, but no mushy concern or pity—thank fuck, no pity. Lupe’s nostrils flared. She nodded and flicked the butt into the back of the flatbed.
“Alright, then.” Jess started up the drive, her footsteps leaving holes in the snow, crunching the wet gravel below. “Don’t scar them.”
Lupe scoffed. She balled her hands in the pockets of her borrowed jacket, hurrying to catch up. “Wait, wait, you think I’m gonna be the one to scar them?”
Jess’s mouth crooked.
“Yeah. Uh-huh.”
On the porch, Jess pulled the cap off her head. Lupe should have followed suit with her winter hat, for manners’ sake, but Jess’s family had excused her from such niceties since her first week in Moose Jaw, when her teeth chattered halfway through a sentence at family dinner. Now she was under strict, if fond, orders to keep all her warm layers on until she well and truly thawed.
Jess knocked. Inside, Lupe could hear feet pattering, a muffled giggle. A heavier gait approached, slightly uneven. The door swung open to reveal a tall, bony man with light brown hair. Jess’s older brother, Daniel.
“Hey,” he said, with a small smile. “Good to see you, come in.” He stepped back to give them room to pass. “Thanks for coming.”
“Course, dummy," Jess replied. She bent down. This time Lupe copied her, shucking her grimy secondhand boots, knocking them off against the doorframe and setting them on a jumbled pile.
When they righted themselves, Jess leant into her brother’s side in greeting, allowing him to wrap an arm around her. She pressed a brisk kiss to the area of his shirt pocket. As he released her, she thumped her hand into his stomach meaningfully.
He sighed. “It’s in the kitchen.”
“If you’re not gonna use it….”
“I know, I know. You’ll steal it to thump gophers. It’s in the kitchen.”
“Sweet.” She clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll know where to grab it.”
Daniel made longsuffering eye contact with Lupe as Jess moved past him. “Hey, Lupe.”
Lupe suppressed a smile. She enjoyed watching Jess around her brothers, seeing the dimensions of her that belonged to a shithead younger sibling push to the surface. Jess had been so singular in her mind, down in Rockford—uniquely angled, uniquely spoken, uniquely weird. The proof that she emerged from a morass of McCreadys, a scrappy tangle that shared her prominent chin, pinched nose, and ability to talk half without words, was as endearing as it was amusing.
“Hey,” she said to Daniel. They didn’t embrace—Daniel was a bit more respectful of Lupe’s foreign boundaries than some of the other brothers, who pulled her into rough backslapping hugs with the ease of an unquestioned habit. “That cane, huh?”
He shook his head. “I’m about to chop my leg and screw it on at the hip, just to shut ‘em up.”
Now she let herself smile. It still caught her, when Jess’s family welcomed her into their humor as warmly as their houses. “Pirate look,” she approved. “Nice.”
Down the hallway, they heard cheers. “Uncle Jess! Dad, Uncle Jess is here!”
“She is? How did she get in?” He limped toward them, Lupe following behind. “Jesse, did you climb down the chimney again?”
Jess had her hands wrapped around a small child, holding him up and swinging him side to side. His giggles and snorts filled the cramped living room.
“Dad, she’s not Santa Claus,” said the second child, her little bucktoothed face all screwed up under her bangs.
“No,” Jess agreed, serious and cynical. “Santa Claus is a Coca-Cola plant.” She lifted the boy in her arms, Daniel’s youngest son Cameron, and looked him in the eye. “Don’t let him steal your cookies.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. “Thanks for that, Jess.”
Ian, Daniel’s oldest and remaining child, looked up from where he was inexplicably sprawled on the kitchen floor. “Coca-Cola doesn’t grow on plants, it comes from factories.”
Lupe smirked. “Tell her, Ian.”
“Aunt Jess is silly,” his daughter Annis—Agnes—reminded Ian. She made her declaration with both certainty and fondness, and immediately followed it up by going and patting Jess’s side. “Aunt Jess, guess what I did yesterday!”
Jess gave Cameron one last bounce in the air and set him down. He staggered back, beaming. She looked to Annis. “What?”
“She put snow down my pants!” Ian cut her off.
Annis glared at him. “I was gonna tell her!” She turned back to Jess and confided, “I put snow down his pants. He screamed.”
“It was cold!”
Cameron giggled. In a whisper that wasn’t at all a whisper, he added, “She put them in his no-no area.”
“Annis,” Daniel said, with a weary hand to his forehead.
Annis spread her hands. “He is bigger. And he was using me for spitting practice, so.”
“You’re such a tattletale!”
Jess looked at her brother. The corners of her mouth deepened.
Daniel shook his head. “That’s my cue, I think. Lupe, thank you so much for doing this. I’ll be back tonight, treat the house like your home. Jess….” He looked down at his kids. “Feel free to stick as much snow down Aunt Jess’s pants as you feel like.”
The kids giggled. Jess rolled her eyes.
“But if anybody tells your mother, you’re all helping me fill the woodbox tomorrow, got it?”
“Got it,” the kids chorused, or some variation thereof.
Daniel picked up his hat from the table and fit it on his head. Carefully, he bent down to hug each child. “Alright,” he said. “Seriously, be good, eh? Annis, you’re in charge.”
“Hey!” objected Ian.
“I’m kidding.” (At this, Annis visibly pouted.) “Jesse and Lupe are in charge. I don’t want to hear you gave them a hard time. We promised Mum we’d be good while she goes and takes care of Nana, remember?”
One way or another, the kids agreed. Daniel pressed a final kiss to Cameron’s straw hair and straightened. He smiled and nodded to Lupe, hugged Jess again—this time she was the one to wrap her arms around him, making eye contact with him with one hand on his shoulder before she let him pull away—and then he was taking his cane from the table and walking back through the small wooden house, pulling on his shoes, and heading out the door, breaking a small rectangle of grey light across the floor.
Jess and Lupe looked down at the kids. The kids looked up at Jess and Lupe, expectant.
Lupe’s chest started to tighten.
“Alright, alright,” said Jess. “Game plan. Have you guys eaten dinner?”
“Yeah,” said Ian. Annis nodded.
“What’d your dad feed you, live worms?”
“Ew!”
Ian raised his eyebrows. “Yuck.”
“No!” giggled Cameron.
“Oh, yeah? What’d you have?”
Cameron grabbed onto her hand with his small one. “We had– we had eggs. Not worms.”
“Just checking. That’s what he used to feed me, you know. Worms.”
Now even Lupe made a face. “Gross, what? Live?”
Jess looked at her with a mischievous grin. It unknotted something in Lupe. “They’re not bad. Chewy. Wiggling’s the worst part.”
“Fu– Far out, that’s nasty,” Lupe said. She looked down at Annis. “Isn’t that nasty?”
She nodded emphatically.
“Yeah.” Lupe leaned forward, her forearms on the back of a chair. She mulled it over. “Me, I’d at least fry ‘em for you. A little bit of chili, a bit of lime….”
Ian laughed; Annis gave her an outraged, betrayed look. “That’s not better!”
“No, it would be,” Jess judged. When they looked at her askance for her certainty, she shrugged. “Ate a bunch of fried grasshoppers in my twenties.”
Ian’s gaze stretched a thousand yards.
Annis squinted for a second and then said, “You ate those?”
Jess bared her teeth. “Protein.”
“Okay, I feel like grasshoppers are a thing, though,” Lupe said, filing that revelation away for later questioning. “They eat those in Southern Mexico. Not the part that I’m from. But I’ve never heard of worms.”
“Maybe that’s what we should have for supper, then.” Jess shook Cameron’s hand back and forth. “Fried worms.”
“No!” he squealed.
She mimed one squirming up his arm with her fingers.
He shrieked and wriggled. When she reached his armpit, she started tickling, and he dissolved into laughter, curling into the floor. The other two kids watched, grinning.
“She’s joking, Cam,” Ian said. His eyes darted to Lupe. “She’s joking, right?”
Lupe smirked. “She is.” She better have been, anyway.
“Phew,” Annis said.
Ian propped himself up on his elbow. “Aunt Jess, can we play a game? Not hide and seek, we did that too much last time."
Jess had knelt beside where Cameron had ended up supine. At Ian’s question, she surveyed the room from there, scanning the furniture and the scuffed walls. Her eyes fell on two wicker baskets. In one, an old farm cat, Kenny, slept, unwilling to be bothered by the commotion. The other overflowed with laundry, pulled from the clotheshorse beside it but not folded. She stood, crossing to it.
Cameron arched his neck, his face tipped upside down, to watch her go.
From the corner of the pile, Jess grabbed a couple of loose socks. Doubling them, folding them into a ball, she tossed it across the room. “Hey, Lu. Catch.”
Lupe caught it neatly in one hand. She held it up. “What do you want me to do with this?”
Jess flicked her eyebrows, a quick dare, and lifted a hand. “Pass.”
Ian’s face lit up. “No, pass it here!”
Lupe almost did, but Jess narrowed her eyes. “Don’t. If he wants it, he’s gonna have to be in the pickle.”
Annis looked up from where she was fiddling with the hole in her dress pocket. “We’re playing pickle?”
“Uh…” Lupe tossed the pair of socks back to Jess. “Looks like it.”
Ian pushed himself to his feet. He ran toward Jess.
“Cameron!” Jess called.
Cameron scampered over. As soon as Ian got up in Jess’s face, she pressed the socks under his outstretched arm into Cameron’s hands.
“Run,” she grunted.
Ian tried to grab him, but Cameron slipped away. He threw the makeshift ball clumsily forward. Only Lupe’s quick reflexes—'for a pitcher,’ she imagined Jess editorializing—helped her scoop it up and send it to Annis before Ian could dive onto it.
Annis chucked it back to Jess.
“Here!” Lupe called and received the throw.
Dogged, Ian kept after it, sprinting around the main room of the house from one of them to the next. He managed to snag the ball after Cameron fumbled it. “Ha!” he celebrated. “Now he’s in!”
Cameron set his face, determination in miniature. The rest of them only passed a few times, though, before it became clear that he was just a bit too little and a bit too uncoordinated yet to fully play. Right before he could get frustrated, Jess said,
“I’m on Cameron’s team! Now we’re both in the pickle.”
Annis, who had been about to pass to Jess, quickly retracted her hand and threw it to her older brother instead. Jess lunged towards Ian, and Ian skittered away—and then they were playing a rough version of tag, the five of them, scrambling in circles the kitchen table chasing after a pair of socks. Every thirty seconds or so someone threw the ball over the table, or a small child crawled under it; each time led to a wild, careening about-face as the direction of the chase flipped. Their feet skidded across the floor. Children squealed and panted.
Lupe, professional athlete that she was, broke into a sweat. Her cheeks hurt from grinning.
“Hurry, Cameron! Run!”
Cameron quickened his strides. His bare foot caught on the lip of the floor. With a thud, his face met the cabinet.
Adrenaline surged in Lupe’s chest. Muscle memory took over: she grabbed him, her hands on his coarse shirt, pressing into his ribs. He weighed hardly anything, fucking prairie kid, he should have weighed something—as she set him right onto a chair. For a moment, he could have been one of her younger sisters. Rocío always got the same stunned look after a fall. Lupe used to scoop her up the just like that, before she would have a chance to cry and alert the adults. Don’t cry, that same part of her mind prayed, don’t cry, don’t cry–
Cameron tipped his face into the back of the seat for a long second, then two. The other kids held their breath.
“You good?” Lupe asked, gruff.
Cameron nodded. He peeled his little head from the chair. He had a red spot on his forehead and his eyes were very blue. “Can we change games now?”
“You bet,” Jess said. “Anything you want.”
“Can we go outside?”
“Yep,” Jess said. She scrubbed her hands across the top of Lupe’s shoulders in a relieved, congratulatory way. “Grab your gear.”
He and the other kids hurried off to find their coats.
“Nice one,” Jess said.
Lupe couldn’t take the compliment. She couldn’t breathe. She stayed crouched, staring at the empty chair and the pair of socks bundled on the floor.
“Lu,” Jess tried again. She moved around her, into her line of sight. “Hey.”
“Why did we let them do that?” Lupe burst. “That was so fucking stupid, it’s cramped in here, the floor’s uneven– Of course they were going to fall. The way he hit that cabinet, he could’ve knocked himself out. Who the fuck plays pickle indoors?”
Jess’s hands found her upper arms. “Hey. He’s okay.”
“But–”
“Lupe. He’s fine.”
Lupe blinked fast, staring up at the ceiling. Her mouth shivered. She shook her head, bringing the back of her hand up to her face.
“Is she okay?” asked a small voice behind them. Annis. Fuck.
“Yeah,” Jess said, with a sureness that Lupe, for one, couldn’t match. “She’s good. Do me a favor and fix your brother some water?”
Annis must have nodded. Her footsteps led toward the kitchen and Jess’s serious, impassive gaze fixed back on Lupe.
“Shit,” Lupe muttered, because she was freaking the kids out, now. She shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t be around them, what the fuck was she thinking–
“Knock it off,” Jess said.
Her brusqueness jarred Lupe out of her thoughts. “What?”
“Whatever’s running your head right now. Stop it.”
“I can’t just–” She ran out of words, helpless.
Jess waited a beat. “You wanna take the keys to the truck?”
Something tore in Lupe’s chest. “What– You want me to go?”
Jess sighed. “’Course not. You’re good with them. I like seeing you guys together.”
“So then–”
“You feel like you can stay?” There was no judgment in the question. It was concern, really, in Jess’s frank way. Her eyes were Cameron’s color, in the dull light of the window.
The plain practicality of it made Lupe want something more, something fuller, want Jess’s arms squeezed around her so rough and so tight that it eliminated every possibility of her insides falling out of her body and onto the floor. She wanted Jess’s hands smoothing over her hair, over and over, like they did after that first afternoon when one of Jess’s other nieces Sammy fell asleep on Lupe’s leg and Lupe ended the night drinking too many beers and vomiting into a wooden bucket.
She didn’t want to leave, to take the truck back to Jess's parents' house and sit alone in the spare room, her mind and heart running the same bases over and over again that they had since she was seventeen.
But could she stay?
She swallowed. The back of her mouth tasted tart.
“Yeah. Yeah.” She tried for some bluster, leaned back on her heels. “The hell are you talking about, of course I can stay.”
Jess twisted her mouth and looked away—exasperated, knowing, relieved. She squeezed Lupe’s arm one more time and stood up.
Lupe took one last shaky, bracing breath before she used the table to lever herself to her feet.
“Alright,” Jess said to the kids, who had gathered in the kitchen. She said something else that Lupe tuned out.
Lupe’s eyes fell to Cameron, who had a tin cup in his hands. Seeing him drink made her aware of her own dry mouth. She grimaced at Annis, who still watched her steadily. Stepping past her, Lupe opened a cabinet at random. She saw plates and bowls. She tried another one—bottles of oil, their flour ration, jars of salt and fat.
“What’re you looking for?” Annis asked.
“Cups for water,” Lupe replied. The words came out croaky, and she cleared her throat. “You tired me out. You’d give our stealer Esti a run for her money.”
Annis’s mouth twitched. “Really?”
“Mm,” Lupe answered.
“It’s the one on the right,” Ian pointed out.
“Thanks.” She flipped open the door. All the cups sat upside down—another thing she had considered one of Jess’s personal quirks until she got up here. She took one of the ceramic mugs usually reserved for the adults and filled it from the jug on the counter.
“Okay,” Jess said, as Lupe sipped water. “You guys wanna go put on your boots?”
They nodded. Cameron set his cup down on the table with a thunk. A bit of water sloshed out, beading on the scratched wood. “Race you!” he shouted, and immediately lost as Ian overtook him in the six yards between the kitchen and the door.
“That means you have to be the one to tie his shoes!” Annis decreed, rounding out the rear.
“No, it means you do!”
Lupe shook her head, watching them. Each sip of her water gradually eased her heart rate.
Jess bridged the couple steps between them to lean against the counter beside her. Slouching, she was at Lupe’s eye level. She nudged her side. “You’re lucky. It’s warm today.”
“Oh, yeah,” Lupe said. “What, a whole thirty-five degrees?” She paused. “Fuck, I hate that that sounds warm now.”
Jess grinned. Her slitted eyebrow lifted, teasing. She pulled a half-done cigarette from her shirt pocket, held it between her lips and lit up with a match. She held it out.
Lupe took it with two fingers. She breathed in, letting the tobacco finish the job the water had started. In exchange, Jess lifted the cup from her other hand, bringing the rim to her teeth.
“Are you coming?” Cameron asked, his voice long-suffering in a way much more suited to someone having waited three hours in a government office than thirty seconds at the door. His older brother knelt at his feet, lacing his boots.
Lupe exhaled, amusement colored in smoke. She caught Jess’s eye. “On our way.”
“Ha!” Ian cheered. “Got you!”
He quickly yelped as Annis smacked him square in the neck.
“Hey!” Cameron shouted, his voice shrill and reedy as it crossed the flat stretch of the yard. “No headshots!”
“That wasn’t his head!”
Cameron frowned, scooping up a handful of snow in his mitten. There was so little of it on the ground that he left a streak of wet dirt where he scraped. He mashed it, compacting it into the latest in a long line of ruddy, mud-stained snowballs, and dumped it at Lupe’s feet. “Get her, get her,” he urged.
Lupe pivoted towards Annis, bending to grab Cameron’s munition. Softening her throw, she arced it into her chest. Annis froze. She slapped a hand to her heart. Dramatically, she toppled to the ground.
Cameron giggled, clapping in muffled glee.
“Lupe,” Ian shouted, “behind you!”
Lupe hardly had time to widen her eyes before a snowball drilled into her ass. It stung straight to the bone.
Cameron shrieked, splattered in proximity. Annis whooped.
Lupe whirled, her mouth open in disbelief.
Across the marbled expanse, she saw Jess’s tongue poking between her teeth.
“Are you serious?” she asked. Until now, they’d been competing indirectly, lobbing soft throws at the kids and warning shots at each other.
In answer, Jess threw another, this one from her left hand. Lupe dodged, but only just. It exploded at her feet.
"You–" This time, Lupe didn’t wait for the Cameron deliberated reloading system. She lunged and dragged the flat of her glove against the snow, squeezing it, feeling the crystals of snow tighten and creak. She pitched it at Jess’s midriff.
Jess, the fucker, caught it in her bare, cold-pinked fingers. She shook her hand out after, face puckered in amused pain. Then she lifted her other arm.
“Shit–” Lupe swore—which, okay, she could only go without swearing for so fucking long, sue her—and started running. Her own returned projectile thumped into the ground behind her.
“Zig-zag!” Ian advised. “Enemy fire!”
She followed the child’s military directions, turning to run toward Jess in jagged angles. Each step spat mud and water into the air, onto the bottoms of her pants. Her toes ached with cold. She tried another rushed snowball attempt, hunching over and slinging it half-bent—this one made contact, spraying against Jess’s legs. She dodged the return fire. As she got within ten feet of Jess, she scooped a last handful. She reached out, making to dump the slush into the back of Jess’s collar.
Instead of backing away, Jess stepped toward Lupe. She grabbed her, turning her in a grapple, wrapping her arms around her from behind and pinning Lupe’s to her sides. Her hips pressed into Lupe’s back and her leg wedged between Lupe’s thighs. Her warm breath played against Lupe’s ear.
“Say uncle,” Jess grunted.
Lupe struggled against her grip. The feeling of Jess against her made her face prickle at the cheekbones, flush behind her ears. The snow in her hand melted—cold water slipping from her fist, dripping down her wrist, soaking into her coat.
If there weren’t children watching, cheering, if they weren’t on Daniel’s property, which was a small lot on the outskirts of Moose Jaw with actual neighbors, if they weren’t–
But they were.
“Uncle,” Lupe grit out.
Jess made a victorious sound at the back of her throat, pressed a quick peck to the side of her head, and let her go.
Lupe staggered forward, unmoored. She turned and Jess was grinning at her, that stupid, half-savage grin, the one she wore when she crossed home plate, her hair escaping her braid and mud smeared across her cheek.
Cold air burned in Lupe’s chest as she stared. Because that was Jess. And she knew Jess. She’d known her, back in Rockford. But she was seeing her in context, in relation to where she grew. She’d been invited to see her where she grew.
She grew here, on these frozen plains, in chaotic muddles of children just like this.
The intimacy of knowing her down to the roots of her, of having permission to know, of all the affection that that knowing brought with it—
Lupe’s heart thumped against the wall of her ribs. It ached, too, in a way her elbow didn’t.
She had to look away, so she looked behind her, to check in on the kids. They’d shifted gears, in the moments since the adult tussle calmed—now they rolled their snowballs in what was left of the snow, stripping it in lanes from the ground like laying down sod in reverse. Annis made the bigger lump so Ian plopped his on top, and Cameron did a somersault like he was a ball himself. He came up sporting fewer cowlicks and more cow pats.
While she watched, Jess moved to her side, body loose and relaxed enough that Lupe didn’t fear for her imminent safety.
Lupe looked up at her. “Tell me,” she intoned, “that we don’t have to give them baths.”
Jess lifted her hand to her mouth, chewing on her nail. Discerning, she eyed them. “We’ll get a bucket.”
“–On every branch, sat a monkey,” Lupe read. They were piled on the kids’ bed, the five of them. Lupe and Jess leaned against the metal bedframe. The picture book that Jess had bought in Chicago sat open on Lupe’s lap. “On every monkey was a gray or brown, or blue or red cap.”
Annis reached up and snagged Jess’s cap off her head. “I’m a monkey!” she said. The sleeves of the secondhand pyjama set dangled down her wrist as she held it aloft.
“Ooh! I wanna be a monkey!” Cameron echoed.
Ian snatched Lupe’s newsboy cap, which she’d put on for this reading. He held half of it and offered the other half of it to his brother. “Here!” he conspired. “We’re both monkeys.”
Cameron beamed. “Ooh, ooh, ah, ah!”
“Keep reading!” Annis insisted.
“The peddler looked at the monkeys,” Lupe continued.
Jess got to her feet and put her arms behind her back, like the man in the illustration. She surveyed the three children on the bed.
“The monkeys looked at the peddler.”
Annis and Cameron made a show of leaning forward and making their eyes very big at Jess.
“He didn’t know what to do,” Lupe read. “Finally, he spoke to them.” She held the book up so Jess could see the words.
“’You monkeys, you,’” Jess read, stilted and haltingly, “he said, shaking a finger at them–” and here, Jess shook her own finger at her niece and nephews– “You give me back my caps.”
Lupe lowered the book so she could read, “But the monkeys only shook their fingers back at him and said, ‘Tsz, tsz, tsz.’”
The kids wagged their tiny fingers. “Tsz, tsz, tsz! Tsz, tsz, tsz!”
“This made the peddler angry, so he shook both hands at them and said–”
And now Jess leaned in, close over Lupe’s shoulder, to read, “You monkeys, you! You give me back my caps.” She straightened and shook her hands for emphasis, glowering.
Ian, anticipating, waved his hands. “Tsz, tsz, tsz!”
The other kids cottoned on. “Tsz, tsz, tsz!”
“You got it,” Lupe said, with a small grin. She skipped the rest of that page. “Now he felt quite angry. He stamped his foot, and he said:”
“You better give me back my caps!” Jess stomped her socked foot against the wood floor.
“But the monkeys only stamped their feet back at him and said…” and here she trailed off, waiting for the children.
They pushed themselves up, wobbly colts on the mattress, and stomped their feet. Lupe bounced and jostled. “Tsz, tsz, tsz!” they chorused. Cameron giggled, dropping back on his butt.
Lupe and Jess made amused eye contact.
“At last,” Lupe read, “he became so angry that he pulled off his own cap, threw it on the ground, and began to walk away.”
Jess looked around her for a prop to use. She reached out and grabbed the tin cup from the bedside. Gulping down the last dregs of water left in there, she turned it over and stuck it on her head. Then, dramatically souring her face, she chucked it to the floor, where it clanged and rolled under the bed. She turned on her heel and walked toward the door.
The kids laughed, rocking back and forth with the excitement.
“But then,” said Lupe, “each monkey pulled off his cap…”
They held their stolen caps up in the air.
“And all the grey caps, and all the brown caps, and all the blue caps, and all the red caps, came flying down out of the tree.”
The two caps rained down to the floor.
As Lupe recounted the peddler picking his caps back up, putting them back on his head, Jess bent and put first her cap, then Lupe’s cap, then finally the upturned tin cup on the top of her head.
“And slowly, slowly,” Lupe concluded, “he walked back to town, calling….”
“Caps! Caps for sale!” Jess hollered. She held her shoulders taut, keeping balance as she stepped towards the door. “Fifty cents a cap!”
Lupe closed the book. “The end.”
“No!” Ian protested.
“Tsz, tsz, tsz!” tried Cameron, carried past the end of the bit. “Tsz, tsz, tsz!”
Annis’s eyes swelled, puppy dog-like. “Can we have another one?”
Ian looked at their meager stack of worn books in the corner. “Velveteen Rabbit?”
“No,” Jess said, firmly. She shook her head so the gathered items fell and ably caught them all before they hit the ground. “That’s it, we read you two.”
“But Lupe has a good reading voice,” plied Annis. “It’s low like Dad’s, but better.”
Jess rolled her eyes. “Nope. No flattery. Come on, into bed.”
The kids looked to Lupe, imploring.
Lupe lifted her hands in the air, one still holding the book. “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I just work here.” Behind her, she heard a snort. She shifted herself off the bed.
“Kiss goodnight?” Cameron appealed, and–
And Lupe just couldn’t.
“Night,” she said, instead of acknowledging his words. She awkwardly patted smooth the rumpled spot she left on the covers. “I– Uh.” She pointed at them. “You guys sleep well.”
“Goodnight,” Annis said, and Cameron nodded and repeated it, if a little forlornly.
“Thanks for reading,” offered Ian.
Lupe grimaced at Jess, whose eyes followed her as she walked towards the door.
From the hallway, she heard the last giggles, the tell-tale smack of a playful smooch. They rebounded in her chest, loose baseballs left in a swinging bucket. She did not linger.
Jess found her in the kitchen, scrubbing the dishes in the sink with water so cold her knuckles ached. She stood there for a moment, watching her. Lupe didn’t look up. The water had a sudsy, gritty tint, but the time-browned ceramic washed clean.
Jess put Lupe’s cap on the counter, folded and creased in the windowed lamplight. For the third time that day—and whenever it was that a coincidence became a habit, became a bearing, Lupe thought they’d blown by it months ago—Jess stepped to her side. She grabbed a dishrag from the bar of the stove door.
Taking the clean dish from Lupe’s hands, she began to dry.
After the dishes were done and stowed, after the kids whispered themselves to sleep, after they pulled the curtains shut, Lupe dropped onto the couch. Jess, finished feeding more wood to stoke the fireplace, lit two cigarettes on the flames and carried them over. She passed one to Lupe.
Lupe took it, giving her an upward nod in thanks. She rested her legs on the rough-hewn coffee table.
Jess took a seat beside her—coincidence, habit, bearing.
“So,” Jess said, once a few minutes of companiable quiet had gone by. She quirked an eyebrow. “You lived.”
Lupe huffed. “Yup. Even though you tried to take me out me with– What, a snowball? While my back was turned, too. Low blow.”
“Coulda got me back. You missed.”
“Oh, is that how we’re spinning it? I hit you too!”
“Barely.”
“I– Okay, who the fuck throws snowballs, anyway? The weight’s off, it slips in your hand, it’s uneven in the air–”
“Right.” Jess leaned back into the thin cushions. She caught Lupe’s eye. Her leg settled over Lupe’s knee, warm and solid.
“You are too proud of that.”
Jess’s tongue pressed into her cheek.
“Nice show back there, by the way. First time I’ve seen you throw your cap down without a fucked-up play coming first.”
“Nice show yourself.” Her teeth flashed. “If you’re not careful, they’ll draft you for the bedtime pro leagues. You’ll have to drive down nightly.”
“No way.” The response jumped out of her, knee-jerk and blunt. She cut her eyes to Jess, tensed at the possibility of offense.
Jess only sank deeper into the couch cushions, wry expression undimmed.
Something in Lupe’s stomach relaxed, then. These kids weren’t her sisters; weren’t her kids; weren’t even her sisters’ kids, who she only knew from descriptions in letters. There was no obligation. She could say that children weren’t her thing and Jess would still see her as her– well, she’d still be the butch from Jess’s team, up for the winter, who’d done her family a solid one night. There would be no guilt in it.
She savored that relief, swallowed back the feelings that tried to push around the edges. She could only feel so many layers at once, sitting and smoking her best friend’s shitty cigs, the firelight and heat flickering and stretching her cheeks. She trailed her eyes from Jess’s face, dropping her gaze to the stained and ratty arm of the couch. It had a dip in it, worn like a saddle. Who liked to perch there?
Ian, she would bet. He hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet—Annis had an inch on him. He probably liked the height.
The thought made her want to roll her eyes, made her want to grin. She liked them, these tiny humans. For now, it could be as uncomplicated as that.
“Once a fortnight,” she said, “at most.”
The corner of Jess’s mouth pulled sideways. She lightly pounded her wrist against Lupe’s thigh like she was amping up a crowd at Vi’s.
“Whatever,” Lupe grumbled, no sting to it at all. She stubbed out her cigarette on a plate on the coffee table.
Jess’s shoulders hitched in silent laughter.
With a mulish impudence, Lupe reached up and grasped Jess’s chin between her thumb and hand, holding it in place. Jess arched her brows, still snickering, and extended a lazy arm to stub her smoke out, too. She kept her eyes locked on Lupe’s.
Releasing her chin, Lupe leaned in and kissed her, catching her lower lip beneath her teeth, biting just a bit harder than was necessary. Jess grinned, her warm lip stretching, her teeth hard and slick against Lupe’s mouth. Heat sank through Lupe; she shifted her sitting position, getting some friction against Jess’s leg and the couch. Her hand found the back of Jess’s neck.
Jess’s hands dropped to Lupe’s waist, to where the belt-loops of her pants sat against her hips. She rubbed circles through the fabric, rhythmic and not too gentle, lips meeting Lupe’s again.
Lupe could feel herself getting worked up, fire crackling at her back, Jess’s shirt collar flattening under her fingers. “Shit,” she said, pulling away.
Jess frowned. Even in the dim light, Lupe could see her pupils blown, her lips dark. “What?”
“There are kids next door.”
Jess snorted. “So? How do you think Annis and Cameron were made?”
Lupe wrinkled her nose. “Ugh, don’t say their names, not– We’re on your brother’s couch. He’s gonna come home and–”
“At least you’re not his girlfriend.”
“Jess–”
“Alright, alright,” Jess said, with a teasing pinch to Lupe’s waist. She lay a last peck on her lips and shifted.
Lupe, despite her own reluctance, rearranged herself too. “But when we get back….”
“Back to my parents’ house?”
Lupe groaned, closing her eyes. “Fuck.”
Jess’s grin seeped into her voice. “There’s still time,” she said, mocking Lupe from the afternoon. “We can still run. Last train leaves town at eleven.”
“Don’t fucking tempt me.”
Lupe had halfway nodded off, head angled back somewhere between Jess’s bony shoulder and the wall, when there was a jangling sound from across the house, and half her pillow moved out from under her. She sat up, rumpled and blinking, to the rhythm of an uneven gait.
Daniel came into the room, leaning on his cane more than he had been when he left. He dropped heavily into a kitchen chair, extending his stiff leg out in front of him.
They stood. Lupe was suddenly, overwhelmingly grateful that they had not fucked on the poor man’s couch.
“Hey,” he said, attention drawn. His smile couldn’t hide the deep lines beneath his eyes. “How’d it go? Were they good for Uncle Jess?”
Jess gave him an appraising look. “We had it handled.”
Lupe, for her part, felt a knock of satisfaction against her sternum. We had it handled. They had, hadn’t they?
“Oh, yeah?” Daniel asked.
“Uh-huh.” Jess smirked. “And you’re gonna get the singing performance of a lifetime tomorrow. They rehearsed and everything. I think you’re really gonna be impressed.”
“Grand.” To Lupe, he asked: “You haven’t happened to see my earmuffs sitting anywhere, eh?”
She feigned a wince. “Yeah, sorry, I had to borrow them. Lost forever, now.”
Daniel’s mustache twitched. “Then Jesse, I look forward to my beautiful children’s singing. And I double look forward to you joining ‘em at Ma and Pa’s next week.”
Jess gave a little half bow, and the old ladies who had called Lupe a sinvergüenza growing up had never seen the likes of Jess McCready. There wasn’t a shameful bone in her body as she leaned in and said, “Me too.”
Daniel rolled his tongue under his bottom lip, exasperated and fond. “Alright,” he said. “Thank you both again. Can’t say how much me and Mary appreciate it. Lupe, let me know your favorite kind of beer that they sell in town.”
“You don’t have to–”
But Jess was giving him a look that overwrote Lupe’s words, speaking McCready-ish in glances, and Lupe gave it up for lost.
There wasn’t much to say past that—Jess banked the fire and Lupe grabbed their coats and hats. Before they left, Jess grabbed the cracked school slate that she’d stowed next to the laundry basket. (Apparently, the slate had come to the family two years ago by way of the Sunday School teacher. Or, rather, Jess’s biblical knowledge of her.)
She set it on the table in front of her brother. From this afternoon, the black surface was covered in drawings—a snowman, a flower, some scribbles. A ball-and-stick GOOD NIGHT DAD! scrawled off-center through the middle. Staring at it, Daniel swallowed. He reached up, caught Jess’s fingers. They shared a last wordless McCready-ish exchange.
“Careful getting home,” Daniel said, aloud for benefit of the both of them. “I almost hit the rhubarb on the way here.”
“Well," Jess replied. "Good thing I’m a better driver than you." She squeezed his fingers and withdrew her hand.
By the door, Jess and Lupe shrugged into their coats and laced up their boots. The dim light from the windows shaded the porch. Beyond it, dimly, snowflakes were falling.
"Fuck," Lupe muttered, pulling down her winter hat. She marched in place on the doormat. "It's cold."
Jess grinned. She offered up her elbow. Lupe took it.
Arm in arm, the pair set off, into the dark prairie night.