FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #9

It was the thing he'd always loved about her.  Her head was bent over the newspaper, pencil in hand.  She was focused on the Sudoku puzzle.  She had a scrap of paper to the right, beside her coffee mug, scribbled numbers and calculations haphazardly spilling to its edges. 

 

She’d cut her hair short the previous summer and was in the process of growing it back.  It was at that awkward length where it was too short for her to pull it back into a ponytail but long enough that it kept falling into her eyes.  That one lock had come loose again, hanging down over her face.  Her slender fingers hovered at her temple as she jotted another sequence of numbers on her note paper, the unruly tress temporarily forgotten in numerical zeal.  Her pencil stilled, and well-manicured nails swept the errant hair back behind her ear.  Her left hand still hung in the air with her elbow resting on the table, pinning the newspaper in place.  Her lips moved in silent recitation of the numbers that puzzled her.  Michael spooned some oatmeal into his mouth and watched her eyes dart over the printed grid. 

 

Last year, it had been a far more significant set of numbers that vexed her.  After her father’s death, when all the bills came due for the funeral and the memorial and all the other arrangements and legal wrangling.  After it had become obvious that any inheritance left to her was dwarfed by the costs incurred.  He watched her, morning after morning, thumbing through a stack of notices printed on colored paper to denote increasing urgency of payment. 

 

She’d worked out a budget for them.  The pen she used to hack away at their expenses over coffee still sat in the tin beside the phone, her teeth marks indelibly worn in.  Forsaking her monthly hairstyling in favor of a severe, short bob, Anna’s vanity was the first casualty of their financial pains.  She took to cutting coupons each morning, as he sat and watched.  She traded her car for a bus pass but still, somehow, managed to buy him a new laptop for Christmas. 

 

Then there was Georgie.  With their father gone, it was now Anna’s responsibility to look after her younger brother.  It fell to her to make sure that Georgie took his daily meds, to remind him to bathe, and put leftover food into the fridge, to calm him down when he heard voices.  Instead of running upstairs to wake their father, Georgie now phoned Anna at four in the morning when he couldn’t sleep because he kept thinking about the listening devices he was sure his neighbors had installed in the pipes of the house, or how he should fix the holes in his socks.  At 32, Georgie had the mind of a troubled 10-year-old. 

 

Michael always felt bad for grousing about the late-night phone calls, and the amount of time she spent away from him.  Whenever the argument came up, her eyebrows would knot together as if pulled by some invisible string of irritation and worry.  He could almost hear her teeth grind as her jaw clenched. 

 

“What do you want me to do, Michael?” she would hiss at him.  “He’s my brother.” 

 

Each morning, as she raised her chipped blue coffee mug, he could see above the arc its brim made over her nose, lines that had not been there the previous year spreading further across her face.  Slowly, as their father’s house fell into disrepair and it became obvious that Georgie could not manage on his own, a stack of pamphlets for mental health facilities began to amass next to the pile of bills.  It took her months to convince Georgie to sell the house. When he finally agreed all the money that came from the sale went towards putting him in the best home she could find.  None of his inheritance could pay for their father's final arrangements.  Georgie needed arrangements of his own. 

 

Michael took a sip of his coffee and watched her fill in another number on her puzzle.  That one lock of hair had worked itself out from behind her ear again.  She swept it back, smoothing it down to hold it in place.  She would make it stay put.  He smiled and tapped the paper in front of her. 

 

“Tough one today?”

 

Anna glanced up, fragment of a smile playing on her lips and murmured, “I’ll get it.”

 

It was the thing he’d always loved about her: her determination.

back to Contest #9