Boyfriend Jeans | Heidi Bell
Rose Marie’s younger son chauffeurs her to the cookout; she is too weak now to drive. She comes across the yard, her sagging cheeks bright with blusher, drooping lips painted pink. She is wearing faded straight-legged jeans and a shirt unbuttoned at the bottom and tied up under her bust, revealing several inches of midriff scarred from surgery. She sits down across from me at the peeling picnic table, and, behind her, the sun comes—a girl stepping down the sky—to dip her toes in the shimmering river that flows by at the edge of the lush midsummer yard. Rose’s auburn wig begins to glow.
Rose and I have forged a connection through the years over various mental health crises and then female cancers—like a Ping-Pong game. But we won’t see each other again. What is there to say? I win.
The grilled meat like river sand, ashes in my mouth.
Later, my sister, Rose’s daughter-in-law, says in a bewildered voice, “I don’t know why she was wearing that outfit.”
There are clothes that live at the margin of my closet—sleeveless blouses and miniskirts and fitted T-shirts and turtlenecks that I long, against all reason, to wear again someday. The flowered fabric and cashmere seemed to have slipped through my fingers before I had a chance to appreciate how they felt against my skin, how it felt to be who I was then.
Maybe Rose, ravaged by uterine cancer, has finally reached her target weight. Which of us women past a certain age wouldn’t be tempted to accept that mean little gift—the sharp edges of hip bones, the shadows between the ribs.
About the Author:
Heidi Bell’s short story collection Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse (Cornerstone Press, 2024) was named a 2025 Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association. She is at work on a novel and a collection of micro memoirs.