Short fiction: Wonderbeans

~800 words
PG rating

Summary: Evelyn has just moved in with her boyfriend, Dave, and finds that figuring out the toilet-seat situation and other cohabitation conundrums is much easier than breaking the news to her mother.

Mom stared down into the metal bowl of Kentucky Wonder Beans by the sink, snapping the prickly ends off. The snaps cracked like a whip in the otherwise silent kitchen. On a stool near the oven, Evelyn squirmed.

"It's not like I killed anybody, Ma," Evelyn muttered.

Snap.

"Think of all the money I'll be saving. I could go to back to college or..."

Snap. Amazing how Mom managed to interrupt even when she didn't open her mouth. A waft of disapproval rose from Mom's bowl of beans.

"Look, I love him,” Evelyn went on doggedly. “This is a good thing."

Mom sprayed water over the trimmed beans, rinsing imaginary dirt off. Evelyn didn't have the heart to remind her mother that the grocery store cleaned the vegetables nowadays. Waxed 'em, even, and made 'em pretty for the customers. But she knew it wouldn't serve. Mom wore her worries like badges, and dirt on veggies was right up there with cooties on public toilet seats.

"Reach up in the pantry and grab me some pepper, Evie, will you? That big can of it," Mom said.

Without even thinking about it, Evelyn hopped down from the stool and over to the pantry.

"You can call me Evelyn, you know. Everybody else does. I'm 23, not a kid," Evelyn noted, handing down the bulk-sized container of pepper. Mom believed that black pepper overdoses were the secret prevention for cancer, so she'd always doused her dishes with the stuff. Evelyn had been the only kid in her school with a quarter-inch of pepper on her ham sandwiches. Thank God Mom had stopped short of peppering the Twinkies.

Mom paused, one brow raised, and took the can of pepper. She made a huffing sound and turned back to the sink, not bothering to comment on the name suggestion. Or anything else.

Evelyn watched her mother dump the beans into a giant vat and add water, bacon fat, a pressed cube of chicken bouillon, and, of course, a half ton or so of black pepper. Despite the overuse of pepper and garlic (good for the heart), Mom's soul food was positively epicurean. Evelyn had missed these dinners with her mother, she realized. Not the chatter and the guilt, but the food. And maybe some other things.

Mom rinsed her hands and dried them on her tacky frilled apron. Evelyn took that as a signal that her mother was ready to talk.

"So Dave and I were thinking ... we’d like to have you over. Hey, maybe I could even cook dinner for you. Wouldn’t that be weird? What do you think?" Evelyn decided to recast the conversation. It sounded less defensive if she framed her Grand Announcement as an invitation. Her mother was a stickler for social niceties, to the point of once using that walking-with-encyclopedias-on-the-head method of improving Evelyn's posture. Mom didn’t usually decline invitations if she didn’t have a specific schedule conflict. She considered it rude.

Mom's hands were still bunched in her apron. Her mouth tightened, but her eyes didn't look angry.

"Would you like some peach cobbler for dessert?" she asked.

"Mom, I just invited you to dinner. Can we talk about that first?" Evelyn pressed. She'd never noticed those lines around her mother's mouth before. Had they always been there? Her mother was old-fashioned, sure, but never old. Evelyn felt betrayed by those lines.

She tried again a few other times to bring up the topic of her recent change in living arrangements, but Mom didn't bite. Stoic, that one, Evelyn thought. Stubborn, even. Finally, halfway through cutting up onions for the baked chicken, Evie gave up. She told her mother about work, about the schizophrenic behavior of her Subaru (probably an alternator problem, her mother diagnosed), about how her high school best friend Jasmin had moved to New York for no good reason and had a bathroom the size of a pizza box. Mom offered the extended family update: Cousin Daniel was doing well in rehab, Aunt Marie had gotten a new puppy who'd already eaten the dining room drapes, and Granna's last visit to the cardiologist had been uneventful.

When they finally sat down at the tiny table in the corner of the kitchen, divine-smelling food laid out between them, Evelyn wondered at the lack of tension. Hadn’t there been tension earlier? But it had wafted out with the smell of roast chicken and garlic. It was almost like she'd never moved out. She looked across at her mother, lines around the mouth and all, and felt so much at home that she wanted to cry.

Mom’s eyes gentled; she speared a piece of chicken with her fork. "So this house you and Dave are living in, is the stove gas or electric?"

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Story copyright 2009 by Vivien Jackson. Image from MarthaStewart.com.