36 The Meadow Are You Happy? Steven M. Smith The visiting mother embraces her daughter-in-law in the back yard at the patio table. Its shattered glass top replaced with a half sheet of plywood. The offset umbrella above them tilted to the west. The afternoon sun is singeing the uppermost limbs of the dying oak. The in-ground pool is anticipating another steamy midnight when the teen-age couple hops the chain-link fence and nervously, yet cautiously, climbs down the ladder into the troubled deep end, stirring with their hips until the chlorinated water sloshing between their thighs becomes a sparkling froth in the starlight. Air traffic controllers have keyed the blue sky with vapor trails. Some sirens in the distance. The lonely coonhound the next block over is wailing. Elvis Presley is singing “Suspicious Minds” for the divorced nurse in her upstairs bedroom across the street. A mourning dove is cooing on their ridge vent. A squirrel is vandalizing their bird house. Just now the daughter-in-law slips from her mother-in-law’s loosening embrace. They both swivel in their patio chairs to view the middle-aged man in baggy swim trunks sprawled out on his cracked resin lounger, eyelids sunburned shut, persistent flies buzzing around his wide-open mouth, mustard-stained lips smacking between snorts, pieces of hot dog buns and relish and elbow macaroni litter his chest hairs, hands knotted up and twitching on his belly. Wedged into his crotch is a half empty bottle of IPA—its eleven empty brothers tossed for dead in the weedy grass.
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