Rise Read Free Page A

T-shirt and his skin was pink from the sun.
    In her memory she kissed him. His lips tasted like lemons. In her memory he didn’t pull away. She felt so small there beside him, small as a girl when he touched her cheek. His hands were callused from the shears, and all her life she’d never know anything more perfect than his breath against her skin.
    Her mother said a heart at peace gives life to the body. Also, we are all small in the eyes of the Lord. Don’t listen when they call you names. How could they know what it’s like? She heard her mother’s voice those nights when the air was still. Those summer nights when she could feel her jawbone growing. She was almost fifty and the radiation wasn’t working anymore. Her teeth were starting to spread, and her features were getting coarser. She didn’t look in the mirror when she washed her face. She closed her eyes, but she could feel the ridge across her forehead where the skin had started to thicken. Her mother’s voice came back to her after all these years. Don’t be afraid , she said. He raises us upward. He carries us inside His palm , and sometimes Freda could feel her mother’s fingers press against her cheek.
    He took a pretty girl to the prom. But you already knew that’s how things would go. He took a pretty girl with tiny wrists and ankles, and there were more until he found the girl who was meant for him. She wasn’t the prettiest in the group, but she looked like him, how her eyes slanted. She was a good three inches taller than him even in her Converse sneakers. She wore his denim jacket and his plaid flannel shirts and he opened the car door for her and closed it again, and they drove together like they’d always been a pair.
    Somebody tied her feet to the ground and her hands to the wooden wheel. Somebody else worked the wheel and pulled her upward, stretching all the muscles around her sockets. It was her companion, this feeling. She couldn’t call it pain. It was the pulling she felt in her bones. Sometimes it carried her upward, and she knew her mother was right. Sometimes it pulled her the other way. She moveddownward through the dirt where her flowers had once grown, down to the rocks that would become the mountains, and she was so small beside them.
    All beautiful things go away. Everyone knows this is true. Their son looked like him, and he rode a bike just like him, too. They were back for the first time in years. They came to check on Grandpa Fitz. They weeded his rock beds and adjusted the sprinklers, and Teddy’s wife was out there in her capris, trimming back the hedges. Freda rolled closer to the window so she could see them better. That boy with eyes like his daddy and those skinny brown legs. His hair almost white from the sun. Every year it would get a little darker. And her Teddy was out there cutting the elm tree back from the power lines. His son ran circles around him and pointed to the sky, and he didn’t listen when Teddy shouted. His momma had to pull him away from the falling branches. Teddy was almost thirty. How could that be. He was a first lieutenant. She knew this from Mrs. Dillman’s youngest daughter. In another few years he’d be a captain because anything was possible in this world. He sat up there in the branches, and his back was so straight.
    He came by in the evening with a jelly jar full of flowers. Snapdragons and tiger lilies and snowfire roses. His wife had put ice cubes in the water to keep the blossoms fresh. Teddy knocked on her door, and when she didn’t answer he knocked a little louder. She could see him from the window in her living room. He was standing on the wheelchair ramp, and his boy was there beside him. He waited a good five minutes before he set the jar outside her door. He wouldn’t have said anything about her jawbone or her bent fingers or how her back was shaped like an S. He would have taken her hand and knelt down to