The Mother Garden by Robin Romm

Then with this in mind, he turns her around, lowers her onto all fours, lifts her butt into the air. He cups the one good breast as he situates himself inside her.
    I don’t feel like talking on the way home. Neil taps a song on the steering wheel with his thumbs. He cracks the window and his curls blow toward me.
    Neil hasn’t forgiven his mother. Mindy leaves messages on our voice mail during the day, when she knows he’ll be at work. Call when you want to, she says. I love you. He claims he’s through with her.
    I ran into her a few months ago at the grocery. She wore a sheer red top beneath her blazer. Her face shone with makeup. She stopped her cart near a wall of bread and gave me a long hug.
    â€œHow’s Neil?” she asked.
    â€œHe’s coping,” I said. Mindy’s cart held a whole roasted chicken, a bottle of wine, some flowers. As I stood chatting with her, a man with owl-framed glasses approached. His gray hair stuck out from his head like he’d just been licked by a giant tongue.
    â€œDarling,” he said to Mindy, “I couldn’t find that coffee.”

    That night, Winston jumps into bed. He looks deeply at Neil and Neil looks back. I take the newspaper and set it between us. Neil pets Winston’s ears.
    â€œSometimes I see my dad looking back at me,” Neil says. I look at Winston’s dark eyes and for a moment, I can see Geoff, too. His silent pleading toward the end, when he could no longer talk, when he might have said anything. Finally Winston can’t stand it anymore and he hops off the bed to lie on the floor.
    If I focus, I can hear the watches ticking from where Neil has put them on the dresser. Neil never fixes the time on them, though he winds them before he sets them in their rows. Geoff must have glanced at those watches thousands of times. I wonder if he ever imagined their life after him.
    â€œI would never do that to you,” Neil says. “I know there’s part of you that thinks I would.” For a moment, I find this switch confusing. He scoots toward me, smashing newspaper beneath him. I try to pry the newspaper out but it’s stuck. Winston whines. He’s noticed an old bone under the dresser and looks to me for help or approval.
    â€œDo you believe me?” Neil asks.
    He crawls on top of me. I hold his ears, put my forehead against his, and feel the bone there.

THE EGG GAME
    U RI KEEPS THE EGG NEAR HIS KEYBOARD AS HE returns phone calls. Half of it sticks out of the hole India cut in the pink sock. “You think we’re going to lay down and die? Just like that?” the attorney screeches, his voice tinny through the receiver. Uri runs a forefinger around the spot where shell meets polyester. As the lawyer starts in on the points of his counteroffer (five hundred dollars instead of twenty-two thousand), Uri takes a red felt-tip pen and draws a little face on it. Two round eyes with long lashes and a mouth shaped like a heart. It doesn’t look like a baby; it looks lascivious. He takes the egg out of the sock and flips it to its clean side. This time, with a black Sharpie, he makes round eyes with little dots in them, a small horseshoe-shaped nose, and a smile. It’s no infant, but it’s an improvement.
    Blithe comes in as he’s hanging up. She’s wearing a red silk shirt with a plunging neckline. A little pearl buries itself in her cleavage.
    â€œDid I do this right?” she asks, placing a memorandum on his desk. She always wears her hair in a giant cascade. Locks of orange curls tumble over her cheeks and shoulders while the rest of her hair sits heaped on top in an arrangement of glittery hair clips. He can smell her shampoo—something with fruit in it—pear.
    â€œIt looks good,” Uri says. (Why wouldn’t it? He e-mailed his template to her and she hasn’t changed anything.) He notices a run in her panty hose; it starts inside her little black heel,