Lilac Mines by Cheryl Klein Read Free Book Online

into a sepia picture: small brown houses, trailers, structures that appear to be frozen on the verge of collapse. The other side of the street is like a giant Christmas tree lot. Some of the pines grow straight up out of white desert sand, as if they don’t need water or soil or any of the things that trees need. And as her gaze travels west, the mountain turns a preppy green. Lush and still as a wall calendar.
    Anna Lisa’s house is just a few blocks into the green side of town. Like the other houses on Juliet Street, it’s a sort of a modern cabin. The structures Felix passes are naturally colored and pimped out with un-cabin-like amenities: satellite dishes, air conditioning boxes, mail boxes built to match the homes. Felix is thankful that Anna Lisa has limited her decorations to a “Beware of Dog” sign and a bush of yellow flowers. In the window, a motley row of purple glass bottles do their best to shimmer in the 6 p.m. sunlight.
    Gripping the smaller of her suitcases and fighting her fluttering stomach, Felix knocks.
    The sound of furious barking makes Felix snap her hand away from the door. Anna Lisa opens it with one hand, wrestling a black standard poodle with the other.
    â€œStay, Coal,” she says sternly. The dog reluctantly obliges.
    Her aunt’s hug is light, but it still aggravates Felix’s bruises. Afterward, Anna Lisa stands in the doorway for a nervous moment. She’s wearing jeans that hug her sizeable hips, a T-shirt advertising “Lilac Mines Festival 1997.”
    â€œYou’re here,” she says. “That was fast.” She has that lesbian voice, not quite deep but flat where a gay man’s would be punctuated and italicized. “Well, uh, come in. Dinner’s almost ready.”
    She shows Felix to the sparse guest room at the back of the house. There is a bookcase stocked with gardening books, and a twin bed. Felix turns in a slow circle, the dog’s black eyes following her. She feels like she’s standing in a museum, in an installation called something like, “Anonymous Slept Here.” She unpacks her hats and shoes and hurries to rejoin Anna Lisa in the kitchen.
    Her aunt removes a pot roast from the oven with lobster-shaped mitts.
    â€œWow, check those out,” Felix says.
    â€œFrom a student,” Anna Lisa explains. Felix remembers that she’s a nurse at an elementary school. The elementary school, Felix supposes.
    The pot roast sits in the pan, a big brown lump steaming angrily. Felix can’t believe anyone still eats pot roast. Even her mother makes things like chicken-and-black-bean burritos. Even her friends on all-protein diets eat cheeseburgers wrapped in lettuce. Disgusting and cruel, but contemporary.
    Actually, the pot roast smells delicious. Heavy and savory, carrots and onions swimming in gravy. It smells like her childhood, which takes her by surprise. She sees the old black and gold linoleum, the plates bordered with rosebuds. There must have been pre-burrito days, she realizes. What other dishes have been lost?
    Unlike many of her fellow vegetarians, who claim that a sip of chicken broth will make them ill, Felix loves the smell of bacon and fish sticks and, apparently, pot roast. She eats so many veggie burgers and pseudo-sausages and fake McNuggets that she occasionally forgets that other burgers and sausages and nuggets are made out of real dead animals. She has nearly ordered them from menus by accident. There’s relatively little process involved in pot roast, however. There’s no forgetting here.
    â€œUm, Aunt Anna Lisa, that looks great, but—well, I don’t know if my mom mentioned that I’m a vegetarian?” She’s not sure why this should be her mom’s job, but that seems right. Grown-ups feed, kids eat.
    â€œOh. Well, shit.” If Anna Lisa were Felix’s mother, this is the part where she’d apologize and offer to grill up a cheese sandwich. Anna