"Estrangement" by Zehra Habib

I.

A woman sharpens a knife along the bottom of a mug, then pares away the hard brown root beneath an onion. She thinks of when her son first began to toddle and discovered the kitchen. He opened cabinets, banged pots and pans, and played in the basket of alliums.

The woman sighs regretfully. Her son had gripped an onion with dimpled hands and handed it to her, then tried to stack one on top of another. He made a mess, scattering shards of onion skin over the kitchen floor. She screamed at him. She was young and impatient then, frustrated by the changes the child brought to her life—tethered to his cries—and to her body—breasts once high and tight like garlic heads, later bulbous and weeping pungent milk like liquid from an onion, and scars from tears that made it hard to sit. Besides, without punishment, how would he learn? So she slapped him. His left ear burned hot and red, a faint mark from her ring on his cheek. Yet still he reached his arms toward her.

Now the woman scrapes the skin off bit by bit, trying not to squander any onion flesh, atoning for the wastefulness of her youth. She wipes her eyes with her sleeve. She hadn’t wiped her son’s streaming face that day, but pushed him onto the floor and told him he was bad, very bad, for disobeying mama. When she turned around, he toddled into his playroom, looking for his bear. Now no one’s around to make a mess, or reach into the basket to hand her an onion.

Babies don't stay babies for long; women don't stay young forever. She stands alone slicing onions. Back pain makes it hard to stoop, especially in the morning. She rubs where it hurts, then continues cutting. Her eyes blur, and her hands tremble; she nicks the skin on her knuckle, which has, with age, grown as thin as the membrane between two layers of an onion. She watches the red spread into a wrinkle.

Someone tells her her son now has a daughter of his own, a two-year-old, but no one brings her to visit grandmother. She has no girl to inherit her rings one day. What did he name her, she wonders. She slides the onion slices from the cutting board into a pot of shining oil. Adding salt makes them sizzle.

II.

A man buys a pair of jeans. He has many pairs, but buying things for himself is how he chooses to spend his money.

He had spent his money all his life on his children, but they left and make their own money now. They don't need—or want—him in their lives.

You’re too good for the people you think you love, he once told them.

And we’re too good for your blue-collar ways. You embarrass us in front of the people we know, they said, after cashing in the checks he had written them on their birthdays to help pay off their student loans.

You ought to do—and have—better than I did, the man said.

He uses money to control us, they told each other. So sick of his craziness.

He doesn’t want to leave them his money, so he buys jeans. Today he buys a pair of skinny jeans. They fit his thin legs, if worn below his paunch. He washes them in vinegar and cold water, line-dries them, and tries them on again. They still fit, so he doesn’t repackage and return them.

The next week he buys another pair, then after that, another. He reads reviews online for new brands and styles. He feels as if he were busy doing something important, and besides, he saved enough through a life of thrift to buy what he wants, now that nobody needs him or what he can provide.

He remembers bathing his children when they were little, drying their legs with a towel and letting them sit in the sun. As they grew, he bought each of them jeans in the latest styles so they wouldn’t feel unfashionable in school. But today they won’t pick up when he calls, not even after he leaves a message.

Toward the end of his life, he spends a week in the hospital. The nurses and doctors, the sons and daughters of someone else, are kind. They come quickly when he calls. His children learn of his death from their cousins. In his home they find pairs and pairs of jeans hung or folded in his closet, barely worn. The man willed them no money after all. The children can't—aren't—fit to wear his jeans. So they leave, pockets empty, never to return.

III.

The doctors delivered her mother of her left kidney, small and purple in a tray, dwarfed by a mound of cancer. Her ersatz child.

Her mother sent the photo after the surgery. The daughter couldn’t figure out what it was. When her mother called her later, she didn’t answer, texting Busy with the kids’ sports instead, although that weekend, she wasn't.

After the second scare—an aneurysm in her mother's brain—the daughter joined her cousins’ group on a social media platform she rarely checked. She’d find out about the inevitable indirectly, right? Without having to hear her mother's admonition or feel the old prick of guilt, as if she were to blame for her mother’s health.

Today in real life she watches her children run over a soccer field in Torrance. Her phone beeps. A cousin. A rosary of condolences follows, each one the same. It’s been years since she’s seen or spoken to her; she hardly knows what to feel, except that her mom's side sure had a ton of cousins.

The kids kick the ball one way, then another. They run toward her, then away, then back again. She prefers living in the moment. She puts down her phone and, despite her best coaching—despite her yelling—watches her children run far away, to score in the wrong goal.

Zehra Habib’s fiction and creative nonfiction have been featured in Zone 3, Wigleaf, Apple Valley Review, The Arlington Literary Journal, Hunger Mountain, Orion Headless, Union Station, and Two Review. She was a regular contributor to bazaar magazine in Kuwait, where she co-founded and edited an English-language magazine. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.