My Father’s Ex-Girlfriend
by Rachel Federman
At first, I loved how much space she left between words. Then it started to feel like, Could you give me something? And then like maybe it had been a mistake to move to her crooked house on the coast of Maine.
Dinah was my father’s ex-girlfriend. Or rather she still is. I lived with her for two months during my junior year of college to study the effect of climate change on raphanus raphanistrum. “The summer of radishes,” she called it. But these aren’t the radishes you eat, typically. They’re a wild variety. “They’re both edible,” Dinah said rubbing sunscreen on her forehead.
To me it seemed reckless.
Each morning after a breakfast of toast with the good Irish butter and whatever berries Dinah had picked along Marginal Way, I rode my bike to the cliffs by the ocean where wild radishes grew alongside sea rocket and honeysuckle vines. I felt like a spy, jotting measurements in my notebooks. Was I one? In a slow, distant way? The decay of late-stage capitalism didn’t have many secrets left.
Most evenings Dinah would ask how the radishes were coming along, as if I’d returned from a community garden on the outskirts of town.
I once tried to explain what my work had to do with climate change. “I’m collecting data,” I told her, between bites of corn. “On seed morbidity.” We were on the front porch. The closest neighbors were moving to Nashville the following day. I could see the four children crouched down around a puddle, digging with sticks. Here they were on their last night, but they were just outside playing in the yard like everything was the same.
“And then what?” Dinah didn’t seem to mind butter dripping onto her lap.
“I send the data to the lab.”
She took a sip of wine and nodded. “So are you trying to stop climate change or just say goodbye?”
It’s not like my dad and Dinah were even friends anymore. They were simply part of a recent kind of media that connects you to the detritus of your old life and makes you think it’s still alive. When we stopped talking, I could hear the voices of the neighbor kids, not what they were saying, but the melodies.
I didn’t even know their names.
On Locust Road, a week or so after the neighbors moved, I met Mountain Man. He was tan and had a beard but not in that hipster/craft beer style like the boys I knew at school. More like he didn’t even know it had overgrown. I was biking home when I saw a purple violet. I tried to pick it without fully stopping the bike, but my foot caught in the front wheel and I went flying. Both knees were bleeding when Mountain Man pulled over and offered me a ride. I told him no and waited for him to keep driving. Instead, he picked up his phone. “Mind if I snap a pic real quick?”
“Why?” I hopped on one foot as I pulled up my bike.
Mountain Man shrugged and rummaged around in his glove compartment then handed me a Blow Pop. Finally he shifted into gear and drove off. I pretended to unwrap the Blow Pop and lick it in case he was watching from the rear-view mirror.
When I hobbled around the last bend of Dinah’s unpaved driveway, there was Mountain Man sitting on her porch.
Of course.
“This is Craig,” Dinah said. She had on a man’s blue button-down shirt, open, over a black cocktail dress. “I would have been worried about you, Asherah, but he said you were okay.”
“Why would you be worried?” I let my bike drop to the grass.
“Because you fell.” Dinah gestured toward my bruises.
“But—" I looked at Craig and my legs felt that shiver of something that’s just beginning and probably won’t ever happen. “You wouldn’t have known anything was wrong—" I gave up. Something was off with almost all of Dinah’s logic. She thought she would have been my mother if my father had stayed.
“I’m just glad you’re okay.” Dinah gave me a little hug.
I pulled away from her grasp. She let me go easily, then crossed her arms and looked beyond me, at the empty house next door.
“We were going to sauté ramps,” Craig said, bringing his feet down from where he had been resting them on the railing.
“Ramps?” I started up the front steps.
They gave each other a look, like, Isn’t that charming? City kid.
“I know what ramps are.” I pulled the screen door open.
Craig waved his hand to show he couldn’t care less about ramps. Or, no, he was gesturing for Dinah to follow him inside.
“He likes to forage, too,” said Dinah. “I knew you would get along.”
Was it the sunlight? Suddenly Dinah looked much older. She was still lovely, with her black hair and green eyes, but it was like I could almost make out the ghost she would one day become.
“This is rather unconventional,” Craig said once we were in the kitchen, chopping up rosemary.
Which part? I wanted to ask.
Craig didn’t know that once in the forest behind my house when I was twelve I picked an unknown stalk and dared Nicholas Renshaw to taste it. Craig didn’t know I spent hours that summer pouring through illustrated botany handbooks trying to identify the cursed plant. How I never told anyone what I’d done, but for two years I did not leave that boy’s side, searched his eyes for signs of jaundice, pressed my head against his chest to listen to his heart.
Rachel Federman is a freelance writer who lives with her family in NYC. Rachel has worked in the nonprofit sector for over two decades primarily for organizations that advance minority education. Her band, Dimestore Scenario, used to play in clubs around NYC. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Literary Mama, Palm-Sized Press, Hoot Review, Writers Resist, and Willows Wept Review. Rachel holds a Master’s degree in English Literature from Fordham University. She can be found at rachelfederman.com.