Strawberry Moon | Megan Monforte
Without her shoes, and without a word to her husband, Amy Carr opened her front door, walked through the yard and into the middle of the street. It was nearly 10 o’clock on a Monday night halfway through June and she could hear nothing except the occasional trill of a frog. No garbage cans being dragged to the curb, no dog collars jingling on a last walk of the day, no kids shrieking with delirium in backyards. School had let out on Friday, so bedtimes had expired. And yet, silence. She kept looking over her shoulder, expecting a car to turn onto her block—too fast, as always—but none came. She was alone.
She had to walk four houses down before the moon appeared. She’d known it was there because the sky was telltale-luminous, but the lushness of early summer in her own front yard obscured the view. As it was, she could only see a quarter of it now, from where she stood in the middle of the street. It hovered in the treetops, enormous and golden, and Amy had the absurd sensation that she had stepped into another world. How else to explain this moment? She kept waiting to step on a rock or a stick or some piece of errant litter, but the street was smooth and cool beneath her feet. The air was still and sweet.
“Dad,” Amy whispered, gazing at the sky with wonder, certain her dead father had something to do with it, and also aware of how idiotic it all was.
With a prickle of guilt, she turned back and craned her neck to look at the house where her two girls were in their beds. She thought about the last full moon and how after dinner one night, she’d coaxed Ellie and June from the couch out onto the patio to watch it rise through the trees.
“Sit,” she’d said when her daughters had emerged from the house, grumbling. They were eight and eleven but often seemed more like moody teenagers. Amy lined up the chairs from their wicker dining set, as if the eastern sky were a movie screen. “C’mon. Sit, girls. Watch this with me.”
They’d ignored her and run into the grass to turn cartwheels. Amy had sat down with a sigh, ashamed by the tightness in her throat. She’d always prided herself on her awareness and okayness with letting her girls grow and pull away, but too many things were changing at once. Even the slightest snub unraveled her now. She watched through blurry eyes as the oversized moon rose above the branches like a magic trick. The sky was a faded denim shade of blue, and the remaining wisps of clouds, so faint you thought it might just be your eyes, blushed pink. Ellie and June ran and giggled but eventually looked up and grew quiet, made their way to the patio, and sat with Amy until the night grew inky and the moon became a flashlight in the dark.
Now, Amy thought for a moment about waking them up to see this moon, but their first day of summer break had been long and full and they’d been exhausted. Besides, it would require Amy going back to the house.
“Dad,” she whispered again, and walked toward the moon in her bare feet.
***
Amy’s husband, Nate, had arrived home from work that night just after dinner when she was busy in the kitchen with the dishes. The girls had jumped on him, squealing. Amy had barely looked up. She’d taken his foil-covered plate out of the oven and left it on the counter, then gone upstairs to do what had become her nightly routine: straighten up, turn on bedside lamps and fans, set out clothes for the next day. These were all things the girls could easily do themselves, but after dinner was when thoughts tended to catch up with her, and Amy preferred to have something else to do.
“You disappeared on me,” Nate said from the doorway of June’s room, startling her as she rearranged the menagerie of stuffed animals on their youngest daughter’s bed. Amy disappeared on him every night now. It didn’t usually register. “Just trying to get the girls ready,” she said, without looking at him.
“For camp tomorrow?”
“For bed,” she said, irritation flickering at her temples. “They’re not in camp this week.” All day she had felt calm—well, calmish—and in control of her emotions. She was a pleasant, good-natured, even laughing kind of person. But then Nate came home and she wasn’t anymore. She was the sun, clouded over. This happened most days now.
“What can I do to help?”
She turned to look at him, hard as it was, and saw his eyes. Reddish, glassy, sad. “You’re stoned.”
He looked sheepish. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
“Well, for starters, you asked how you could help. There’s a red flag.”
He laughed.
“Did you drive home from work like this?”
He thought for a moment. “No.”
“What’d you take?”
“Frank gave me one of his things.” She waited. “A cookie.”
Amy sighed, picturing Nate pulling into their driveway, taking a bite of god knows what before coming into the house. Just last week he’d told her he was done with all of that, the baked goods and candies, whatever he hid in his work bag, on closet shelves, and in the very back of the freezer. “I don’t like how it makes me feel,” he’d said. “I can solve this on my own.” Amy had been relieved, not because she cared so much about the substance—was her nightly pour of Pinot noir really any different than his occasional dalliance with enhanced goodies?—but because it wasn’t an actual solution for anything. It was just a temporary escape, and she never had that option.
“Are you mad?”
Amy pulled June’s dresser drawer open so hard it nearly came off its rollers. She grabbed shorts and a T-shirt and tossed them on the floor. June was almost nine, but still liked it when Amy picked out her clothes.
“I don’t know, Nate,” Amy said. “Do you think I should be?”
He followed her as she moved into Ellie’s room across the hall. Ellie had autonomy over what she wore. It was one of the few things she took full responsibility for, even if she tended to wear the same few things over and over. Amy bypassed the dresser and instead turned on Ellie’s bedside lamp, picked some discarded socks off the floor, and threw them in the hamper.
“It’s just that I don’t know how to talk to you anymore,” Nate said, sitting down at Ellie’s desk, which was strewn with markers and paper and library books. Amy took in her husband’s tall frame hunched over in a kid’s pink desk chair. His black hair had gone silver at the temples and was thinning at the crown of his head. Was the depression aging him, she wondered, or their marriage?
“And you feel more able to, now that you’ve eaten Frank’s cookie?”
“Kind of.” Nate didn’t look up when he said this. Amy had no idea what to feel—pity? rage? remorse? It’s why she preferred the hours when he was at work. She could turn off that part of her brain for a while.
“Well, this really isn’t the time or place to talk,” Amy said, gesturing around Ellie’s room. “When is the time?” Nate asked, glancing up at her, and she saw the tears welled up in his eyes. A surge of tenderness was stemmed quickly by annoyance. Nate’s vulnerability used to be a lure for her. He had a depth and a sensitivity that seemed rare in men. But now her days were spent navigating the increasingly complex minefield of her daughters’ emotions. And since her father died, she had her own grief to wade through—and she hadn’t even started trying to deal with her mother yet. Amy couldn’t worry about Nate’s feelings too, and this midlife crisis he claimed to be experiencing. She thought maybe it wasn’t fair of her—hadn’t she promised in sickness and in health?—but of all the people she worried about on a daily basis, Nate was the one she felt should be able to take care of himself.
“You’re always busy,” he was saying. “You barely look at me. I have no idea how to read you—”
“Well, yes, Nate, I am always busy. Thank you for noticing.” She straightened a pile of hardcover books on Ellie’s nightstand and resisted the urge to throw one of them against the wall. The fact was, Amy did not want to talk to her husband anymore when he was stoned or sober or anywhere in between. It was a realization she’d been ashamed to admit, but there it was. And there was nothing to do about it. She couldn’t leave. This was her job now, unpaid work that sucked the life out of her even as she was grateful for it, for the sense of purpose and the all-encompassing nature of it. Taking care of the girls and the house and the everything-else fulfilled her in a way her fleeting public relations career never had, and these days it kept her mind from wandering too far into the weeds. But she and the girls were reliant on Nate’s salary from the insurance sales job he loathed, which kept them afloat, if not often flush. It couldn’t pay for their current home and a sad apartment, which is sometimes what Amy imagined him living in if they split up. And then she imagined her girls spending half their time there and felt nauseous.
“I left your dinner plate on the counter,” she said into Ellie’s closet as she pretended to look for something. “Did you even see it? It’s probably cold now.”
Nate said nothing. She looked over her shoulder, met his gaze for a moment, and then went back to the closet. She’d never been mean before. It still took her by surprise, how easily it came to her now. And there was something about it that felt good, righteous even, as if she’d earned the opportunity to be cold.
“You know,” Nate said, his voice tremulous. “I miss George, too—”
She sucked in a sharp breath. “Don’t.”
With a sigh, her husband stood up.
“Whatever,” she heard him mutter.
Amy stared into their daughter’s closet until she was sure he’d left the room.
***
Seven or eight doors down from her house, Amy finally encountered another human. It was a woman she didn’t recognize, walking an old dog with dingy fur and short legs. Amy knew the daytime walkers by sight, but the before-bed walkers were a different lot. The woman gave her a tight smile as they passed on the sidewalk and Amy said, “Oh hello,” too loudly. She imagined the dog walker texting her husband, Call the police. There’s a crazy barefoot woman on our street. Then she felt the back pocket of her shorts and realized she’d left her own phone at home.
Nate was right; she was never available to him anymore. She often agreed to read an extra chapter to the girls at bedtime, simply to avoid being alone with him. The longer she stayed upstairs, the likelier it was that he’d fall asleep on the couch, and then she could tiptoe to bed herself, no awkward conversations, no pressure to pretend to want sex. None of it sat well with Amy. She would have preferred a happier marriage, an easier marriage, but these were the things someone in their twenties didn’t consider. Back then, her relationship with Nate had been exciting and unpredictable and passionate. Loving him, keeping up with him, worrying about him—it had filled in all her empty places. She’d had no idea she would need those places for other things someday.
Amy stopped at the corner where Ellie and June got on the school bus, unsure where to go next. The moon was higher now, fully above the tree line, just a little less remarkable. I’m chasing it away, Amy thought and sat down on the curb.
She thought again—as she had so often lately—of a conversation she’d had with her dad the previous September, a few months before he died. It was a Sunday late in the month and the girls were spending the afternoon with their cousin, Cam, at an apple farm. Her sister-in-law, Laurie, knew Nate wasn’t doing well, and offered to give her a break. Amy appreciated the gesture, but couldn’t explain that it was worse when the girls were gone. They were her buffer. They were what she focused on when she couldn’t help her husband.
Nate was on the couch, flipping from baseball to football to some black-and-white war movie. The windows were open in the house, and a crisp, clean breeze blew through the screens, occasionally slamming a door upstairs. Amy loved this time of year, when the slant of the sun was gentler in the afternoon, unfurling through the trees into lattice-work shadows on the lawn. It made her wistful for the days when Ellie and June were small and Nate was content more often than he wasn’t. She’d spent many autumn afternoons on an old chaise lounge in their backyard while the girls napped, her eyes closed against the warm sun, listening to the chirping of whatever insects were hiding in the woods. She’d been exhausted then, and worried about a litany of things that seemed ridiculous to her now, but she’d also felt a deep sense of peace. Or maybe it was just in retrospect. Maybe she only realized now how precious those days were, that simple, placid time in her life.
After Laurie left with the girls, Amy dumped the ingredients for beef stew into the slow cooker. For a few minutes, she stood in the kitchen with her eyes closed, willing her brain to focus. Then she dug her car keys out of her purse and called to Nate, “I’m going out,” unsure if she wanted him to protest, to ask her to stay.
“Got it,” he said, without looking away from the television.
She wound up at her parents’ house, nearly an hour’s drive south. She’d contemplated calling Laurie and meeting up with her and the kids at the farm, but the girls would want to know where Daddy was, and she was out of energy for that question. So Amy had stayed on the highway, as if in a trance. Five minutes before she pulled into the gravel driveway of her childhood home, she’d been filled with regret. There were so many other ways she could spend this time. But then she saw her father in the garage, bent over a piece of wood he was staining, Patriots game blaring from the radio on the workbench. Something really good or really bad had just happened, judging from the crowd’s ruckus and the sportscasters’ yelling, which made Amy wince after the peace of her car.
“Hey, Dad,” she said from the garage door. It took a few moments before George Stover glanced up and noticed his daughter because his hearing wasn’t what it used to be. She watched as his startled expression bloomed into a smile, and her arms tingled the way they had when she was a kid. In one clumsy motion, George put down his paintbrush and reached for the radio to lower the volume.
“Ames!” he said, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Kiddo! How long have you been there?”
She smiled. “Only 20 minutes.”
He chuckled as he put his flannelled arms around her and kissed the top of her head, the way he always had. He smelled of sawdust and musty wool and Wint-o-Green lifesavers. He almost always had one in his mouth while he worked.
“I’m just finishing a bookshelf for the living room. Did you say you were coming by?”
“Nope,” she had said, in as steady a voice as she could manage. “Just wanted to say hello.”
“How nice,” he murmured, though a puzzled look crossed his face. “Where are the girls? Your mother’s next door, let me get—”
“No,” Amy said too quickly and reached for his arm before he could step away. “Can I talk to you first?”
“You got it, kiddo,” George said, after a beat. “Everything okay?”
Amy shrugged, feeling her throat tighten. She swallowed and said, “The girls are with Laurie and Cam.”
“Ah,” he said. “And Nate?”
“Home,” she said, and her father nodded once. He gestured to two weathered Adirondack chairs next to the garage, which had been fixtures in the front yard when Amy was growing up, then held up a finger. She watched as he went to the refrigerator in the garage—her mother hated that they had a refrigerator in the garage when they had a perfectly good one in the house; it offended her frugal philosophy—and took two bottles of Budweiser from the door. He twisted off both caps and handed one to her.
“That’s better,” he said and nodded his head toward the chairs. “How are the girls liking school?”
Amy sat down, letting herself slump deep into the Adirondack, and took a sip from her bottle. “They seem happy.”
“That’s good,” George Stover said. He slid into his seat and crossed his legs at the ankle. “How come you don’t?”
Amy meant to laugh but a sob came out instead, a strange, strangled sound that made George sit up and place a steadying hand on her back. She felt so foolish. At thirty-seven years old, shouldn’t she have a better grip? It’s not like Nate’s depression had come out of nowhere. It was a condition, a chronic illness with no cure, like arthritis or diabetes. But that was what she struggled with the most: if he could not fix it, then she could not fix it. And if she could not fix it, would this be their entire life forever and ever? It had been so far, off and on, as long as she’d known him, nearly twelve years now. But he’d been better at hiding it in the early days. And she’d been better at handling it. She’d had the capacity for the weight of caring for him.
Now, she was often restless and panicky, wishing she’d done it all differently—that she’d resisted Nate’s charm when they first met, slowly backed away the first time she found him on his couch under a blanket in the middle of the day when he should have been at work. What would her life be like now if she’d wished him well then and moved on?
When the regret and despair rose in her chest like bile, she looked at their girls. Temperamental, yes, and what mouths on them sometimes. But good god they were sweet, and funny, and just lovely. Amy stared at them and told herself it was all worth it. Ellie and June were meant to be, and this is what it cost.
George Stover kept a hand on her back as she cried, and she watched as tears dropped from her chin onto the side of her beer bottle. She was embarrassed and relieved. “It’s just been hard, Dad,” she said eventually, straightening up, wiping her face, avoiding her father’s eyes. “I just—I don’t always know if I can handle it. Sometimes I just…don’t want to.” She swallowed and added, “I don’t know if I love him enough.”
It was quiet for a while, and Amy could see George peeling at the corner of the label on his beer bottle. “You know,” he finally said in a quiet voice, staring ahead, “you are a lot like me. More than your brother is.”
Amy turned to look at him.
“Your mother isn’t the easiest person to deal with,” George went on. “I don’t know if it’s always been like this and I’m just noticing now, or if we’ve just been together for too long—” He stopped, shook his head quickly, then looked at his daughter. “What can I say? Marriage isn’t easy, Ames. You know that. Hell, you know that just from growing up here.” He chuckled and Amy rolled her eyes and tried to smile.
“But—” George took a long swallow of beer and then pointed the bottle at his daughter. “You’re not responsible for anyone’s happiness besides your own.” He nodded resolutely. “Wasted effort. Remember that. I wish I’d known it sooner.”
Amy waited a few long moments. “Where’s Mom, Dad?”
“Nancy’s,” he sighed, nodding in the direction of their neighbor’s house, “playing Cribbage. They’re the only people on earth who still play Cribbage.” He reached over and ruffled Amy’s hair like she was ten. “Gonna be okay, kiddo?” Before she could answer he said, “‘Course you are. You’re Amy. ‘Nother beer?”
Amy drove home at dusk that night, wondering why she hadn’t married a man more like her father. He wasn’t perfect, and possibly not even a good husband. But with her, he had always been steadfast, gentle, unconditional in his love. Even when she was a teenager and stumbled many times in her pursuit of independence, he’d never judged her or punished her. He’d never overreacted the way her mother had. He expressed his disappointment in a measured way, and made sure she knew he would always be there.
Nate, on the other hand, had won her over with his humor, his gregariousness, his gift for telling funny stories. The outwardness of his personality was so novel to her. He was everything she was not and, at twenty-four, she desperately wanted to be around everything she was not. She could never quite sort out if she was in love with him or just wished she was more like him. But he loved her, with a feverishness she’d never experienced before.
“Don’t ever leave me,” he would say, as they lay in bed, with enough lightness in his voice to make her think he was teasing. And she’d say, smiling, “I probably won’t.” Then he’d nuzzle her neck and say, “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” with a shade of intensity that made her uneasy to think about now, but back then she believed it was all love. Surely, being needed this way by Nate mattered more than whether he had a stable job or predictable emotions.
When she got home from her parents’ that night, just before dinnertime, the girls were already there. She could hear them in the basement, playing a made-up game with silly voices. Laurie had left a note on the kitchen counter next to a brown paper shopping bag full of apples: Fun day. CALL ME. The family room glowed a flickering blue. Nate was asleep on the couch, a different football game on the television. Amy looked at the crock pot, its glass lid fogged with steam, then at the unset dining table. The crisp breeze from the afternoon had turned cold, so she began to close the windows. As she did, she thought of her dad, in his garage, staining another shelf, and wondered if her mother had come home yet.
***
Amy had no idea what time it was, but she knew her rear end had gone numb from sitting on the curb. The moon was high overhead now, still lighting up the neighborhood, but in a less ethereal way. It was just standard moonglow, the kind that shone every twenty-nine-and-a-half days. The real magic had been in its climb.
“Well, thanks, Dad,” Amy murmured, pushing herself up. She brushed off her hands and stepped onto the grass of the treebelt. Without warning, she doubled over with what felt like a punch to her gut. The grief swept in this way sometimes, like a rogue wave, sparked by nothing, or nothing she understood. She crouched on her haunches, trying to keep her breath steady, the wails at bay. It was an acute loneliness, she’d realized, the second or third time it happened. An overwhelming sense that she was alone in the world. She had a few friends, she had Ellie and June, and, even, in some tangential way, her mother. But no one who knew more than she did. Not anymore. George Stover didn’t know everything, she realized that—and he knew less than he gave himself credit for—but he played the part. He understood a girl needed her dad to have the answers, to offer wisdom without judgment, a steady hand, a corny joke. She hadn’t known how much comfort she’d taken in just knowing he was there.
She pressed her palms into her eye sockets, took a few deep breaths, and straightened up. “Are you running away?”
Amy yelped at the sound of a voice close behind her. It took her a moment to realize it was Nate’s. She spun around and looked at her husband. He’d changed out of his work clothes into shorts and a Red Sox t-shirt he’d had since college. The neckline was stretched beyond hope and the hem was ratty. Amy hated it.
“I thought you were still upstairs reading to the girls,” he said. “I went to say goodnight and they were already asleep and you were gone.”
Amy swallowed. She felt both sheepish and furious that he had found her. “I wanted to…see the moon.” She gestured limply behind her.
Nate nodded, looking upward. “Strawberry moon tonight,” he said, and Amy stared at him.
“A what?”
“Strawberry moon. It’s what the Native Americans called a full moon this time of year. Strawberry harvest season.”
Amy continued to stare. “I didn’t know that.”
“I heard about it on NPR on the way to work.” Nate looked at her and shrugged one shoulder.
“I’m not running away,” she said.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did,” he said, and Amy wondered if Frank’s cookie was still working its magic.
“Sometimes I want to.” Her throat ached. She closed her eyes tight to fend off the tears and opened them to find Nate staring at the moon. “Sometimes I need to fall apart, you know.” The words came before she could consider them, or stop them. “Like, every day I want to fall apart. Every day I want to scream, or stay in bed, or walk out of the house and not come back for hours. But I can never do that, because I am holding up the dam myself.”
Nate kept his gaze on the moon. “I know you are.” Then he looked up the street, toward their home, and started to walk. Amy watched his back for a moment, then started to walk, too. “Where are your shoes?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. Four times between the corner and home, she stepped on small rocks. A baby’s cry pierced the night air and a car passed by, going at least 10 miles over the speed limit. The spell had been broken.
More about the author:
Megan has been a working writer since high school, when she freelanced for her town’s newspaper. She has since used her word-smithing skills as a columnist, editor, copywriter, speech-crafter, blogger, and fiction writer. Previously, her work has been published in The Write Launch and she’s twice been a winner of the Bucks County Short Fiction Contest. She lives in Doylestown, PA, with her family. When she’s not working on her novel, she can be found volunteering at her kids’ school or polishing her time step in tap class.
