by Emily Bevan

By the time Marne hurries in, dressed for work in a black suit and black pumps, Tilda's been drinking coffee at the kitchen table for an hour. A newspaper lies on the table before her, tightly rolled, still in its cellophane skin. She's left the lights off, and Marne flicks them on and whirls to the refrigerator, where she plucks a Diet Coke from a near-empty tray.

"You're not eating breakfast?" Tilda says.

"Mommy," Marne says. "I thought you were sleeping later."

Tilda sips her coffee, smoothes her nightgown over her lap. "I tried," she says. "I can't sleep."

"Oh, pooh," Marne says. "All I want to do is sleep. You're telling me, I'm gonna work forty years and not want to sleep afterwards?"

"Where's Jason?" Tilda says.

"He's gone already. Listen, Mommy. I'm serious. You need your sleep. You deserve your sleep."

Tilda finishes her coffee. She uses the table to push herself to a standing position and shuffles to the sink to rinse her cup. When she's nested it safely in the dishwasher, she crosses the room again and opens a cabinet at her knees. Inside, she finds a mixing bowl and a frying pan and comes up with both, one in each hand.

"Mommy," Marne says. "What're you doing?"

"What am I doing?" Tilda says. She shoos Marne away from the refrigerator and swings the door open, looking for milk and eggs. "Where's your eggs?"

"Mommy," Marne says again. "Mother. I have to go."

"Half an hour," Tilda says. "I'm making you French toast. You need breakfast." When Marne doesn't answer, Tilda turns to look at her daughter. She says, "What am I supposed to do?"

"Whatever you want, Mommy, I don't know. Watch TV. Take a nice, long bath. Be glad. Remember how much your back hurt? The headaches you got, trying to grade papers? You called me every day and said you couldn't do it, you couldn't teach anymore."

"Well I can't," Tilda says. But she wishes she could.

After three days visiting her daughter and son-in-law in Dallas, she doesn't feel like watching more television or like taking a bath. Until nine, Tilda mills around the house, sitting down, standing up, looking out the windows. Then she pulls on a pair of jeans and the University of Texas sweatshirt Jason and Marne gave her for Christmas one year. She takes the garage door opener Marne left for her and leaves out the back. It's a still, gray day. No birds, no cars. The trees' ash colored limbs, like thin, dry hands, reach into the sky for a touch that will not come.

Tilda shuts the garage door and tucks the box with the button on it into her back pocket. She makes her way through the side yard toward the front of the house. When she gets there, a tickle in her tailbone implies the coming of a backache. She decides to rest on the stone step leading up to the house, though she knows it will do little to help.

She doesn't sit long before a cat pokes its head out of the bushes lining the front of the house. It looks too thin: its eyes are sunken, and its spine protrudes. Tilda thinks of going inside, of getting the cat a bowl of milk. She'd like to see it lower its head to drink, its pink tongue lapping at the bowl. But she doesn't have a key, only the garage door opener, and she'd have to walk all the way around again. By the time she got back, the cat would probably have run off, anyway. She decides against the milk and calls to the animal instead: "Come on now, Kitty. Come on over here now, Kitty-Kitty. Come on now, Kitty."

Cautiously, the cat steps out of the bushes, its eyes on Tilda. It crosses the porch. It circles around the woman once, purrs and rubs its bony flank, its tail against her legs.

"That's it, Kitty. That's a good Kitty-Kitty," Tilda says. "Good Kitty," she says. "You want some milk? Kitty want some milk?"

The cat turns like a dancer and rubs its other side against Tilda's calves.

"You need some milk," Tilda says. "Or something, anyway. Don't you? Don't you, Pretty Kitty? You want to come with me? Come with me inside?" She bends and wraps her hands around the cat's middle and starts to lift it into her lap. As soon as she does, though, it screeches and disappears into the bushes, leaving Tilda alone, huddled on the step.

She stands and stretches. Sitting down hasn't helped her back. She'd known it wouldn't, that the stone step would only make it worse, but still she'd hoped. She thinks of going inside, but decides against it. The thought of that dark house, of the television squatting in the den with its face flat and blank…the quiet and the monotony seem too close to death.

She crosses her arms over her chest, bracing against the cold that's seeped through her shirt and turned her ears numb, and heads down the street. The gardens, like the trees, are bare. Her footsteps scratch on the pavement.

At the end of the street, she finds a park, but its swing set and its slide stand empty, skeletal without children. Tilda passes it and continues up another residential street, though pain now stabs through her lower back every time her right foot touches the ground. She comes to a library and sits on a bench outside to rest.

There are trees here, too, still leafless and gray, but taller than those behind Marne's house. Tilda can imagine them in summer, the green of their leaves. She imagines sitting in their shade on a warm spring day. She thinks she would talk to them if she could, ask them about the people they've seen and the birds that nest in their branches. She'd ask how it is they turn young every spring, how it is they only grow taller, stronger and lovelier, while the woman she's always known herself to be slowly withers away.

But people pass by on the sidewalk. They come and go from the big brick building, carrying books under their arms or in bags. Tilda watches them, their lucid faces. In a still moment, when the sidewalk empties and there's no one around, she stands and hurries to the glass door, opens it and goes inside.

It is a crowded place, full of people. The stacks stand close together. Computer screens shine blue in a row against one wall. On the other side of the room, the wall gives way to an opening with a counter, behind which women, some probably older than she, stamp patrons' books. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling hum.

Tilda doesn’t know why she's come here; she can't read. Without a magnifying glass or extra-large type, the words swim in her eyes and make her head ache. Still, she doesn't want to leave, and without thinking about it, wanders to the stacks where she finds herself between two shelves filled with books.

"Can I help you find something, ma'am?" a man says. He stands at the end of the row, taking books from a cart and fitting them on the shelves.

"No," she says. "No, thank you. I'd just like to look."

The man nods, finishes his work, takes his cart and moves on. For a second, Tilda wishes she'd asked: do they have any large print books? She thinks about asking the ladies at the counter near the front. She takes a step in that direction, but stops. She realizes she's happy, for the moment, right where she is. She reaches up to touch the bindings of the books lining the closest shelf. The shiny plastic of their covers feels soft against her fingertips.

Emily Bevan grew up in Dallas and earned a BA in English from Texas A&M University in 2000. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot, The Apricot, The Red Pub and The Muse Apprentice Guild. She lives in Houston with her husband, John.