by Emily Rinkema
Lucy found the booth at a farmers’ market just outside the city on a rainy Wednesday afternoon when she was supposed to be looking for a job, having just yesterday quit the one she had found last month. She tended towards quitting, not just jobs, but boyfriends and hobbies and cities and Netflix series.
The weather had kept many shoppers at home, and sellers were aggressively pulling in those who had braved the rain. As Lucy turned away from a woman in an apron waving a giant leek at her, she nearly slammed into a man standing just outside a small white tent. She righted herself and read the sign propped next to him on a chair: FREE MOM. She laughed, and started to back away, but then she looked at the man, who had put his hand on her arm to steady her. He was young. He was hot. Lucy knew better.
“No thanks,” she said.
“But you look like maybe you could use a mom,” he said, and his voice was ten years deeper than it had any business being. She glanced down at herself. Was it the wrinkled shirt? The purple shoes? The bangs? She was not at all in need of a mother. She was good at being motherless, one of the few things she had stuck with in life. She was proud of her independence. She had no one but herself to judge her taste in men, to ask if she was eating enough, to suggest she might finally want to move into a grown-up apartment with more than one room.
Lucy looked at the woman standing under the tent, sensibly out of the rain. She was tall, had long graying hair pulled back into a loose bun. She smiled, and Lucy saw that she had a tiny gap between her front teeth, and the imperfection of it stabbed her right in the heart. She was apple shaped, solid in a way that made Lucy want to fold right into her arms. She had glasses almost exactly like Lucy’s mother wore in the photos she’d been shown as a child, only a little thicker, a little less flashy, a little more face-appropriate. Lucy cleared her throat and turned away.
“Right?” the man said, as if he couldn’t believe how perfect she was.
“Why?” Lucy asked quietly, and she didn’t even need to finish the question. The man put his hand on Lucy’s back and leaned close to her ear. He whispered something about loss and something about seeking, and something about how she had so much to offer the right person. Lucy shuddered, at both his response and at the heat and the air of his breath. He had to be at least twenty, didn’t he?
“Why aren’t you the right person?” Lucy asked, backing up a step.
The young man looked away. “Turns out she’s not looking for a son,” he said, and his voice cracked on the last word. Lucy wanted to take his shirt off and press her cheek against his naked chest.
Lucy pictured her apartment. Where would she put a mom? And did saying yes mean she couldn’t bring this sad, deep-voiced man home for a fuck? She closed her eyes, and imagined how different her life would be, how she’d have to buy another chair. The rain came down harder and Lucy stepped under the tent to get away from it, which felt like an uncharacteristically sensible move.
Emily Rinkema lives in northern Vermont. Her stories have recently appeared in Cutleaf, Moon City Review, Milk Candy, and Wigleaf, and have been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. You can read more at https://www.emilyrinkema.com/ or follow her on BS or IG @emilyrinkema.
Featured image Aubrey Odom on Unsplash
